Slate's Scores
- Movies
- TV
For 2,130 reviews, this publication has graded:
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44% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1 point lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
| Highest review score: | One Battle After Another | |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest review score: | 15 Minutes |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,157 out of 2130
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Mixed: 747 out of 2130
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Negative: 226 out of 2130
2130
movie
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens
The painfully literal ending struck me as a somewhat risible disappointment, and though I admired the movie’s imagination and ambition, I can’t say I ever entered wholeheartedly into its story.- Slate
- Posted Apr 16, 2026
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Dana Stevens
As for The Drama, it runs out of big ideas—and, seemingly, compassion for its characters—before the audience has had a chance to develop our own rooting interest in, well, the drama.- Slate
- Posted Apr 2, 2026
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Dana Stevens
For better or worse, it’s a Brontë adaptation for the era of Instagram and TikTok, second screens and viral memes.- Slate
- Posted Feb 13, 2026
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Dana Stevens
A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.- Slate
- Posted Nov 25, 2025
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Dana Stevens
The resolution of these characters’ arcs, and of For Good’s several other subplots, feels unsatisfying, rushed through and at the same time too fussed over. But any sense of disappointment that Wicked: For Good doesn’t quite live up to the first movie pops like a big pink bubble the moment Erivo and Grande unite one last time to sing the showstopping duet “For Good.”- Slate
- Posted Nov 20, 2025
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Dana Stevens
Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema.- Slate
- Posted Oct 9, 2025
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Dana Stevens
Benny Safdie’s first solo film, to its credit, explores different psychological territory. Rather than entrapping us in Mark’s roiling brain, he seems to be purposely walling us off from both the character’s and the actor’s interiority.- Slate
- Posted Sep 29, 2025
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Dana Stevens
Though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the elements in place to make it the keystone of a new Marvel era, the script (by Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer) never loses a vague, hand-waving quality that leaves its central characters as indistinctly drawn as the moral conflict they ultimately face.- Slate
- Posted Jul 24, 2025
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Sam Adams
Rebirth’s dinosaurs are everywhere, but the more you see, the less it means. They’re good for a scare now and then, but the sense of awe is long since gone.- Slate
- Posted Jul 2, 2025
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Dana Stevens
For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.- Slate
- Posted May 29, 2025
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Dana Stevens
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen during Warfare, even if they were sometimes half-covered during those many cutaways to lacerated flesh. But leaving the movie, my main sensation was relief that that brutal viewing experience was over, rather than reflection on the meaning of the Iraq War, on the experience of war itself, or on the success or failure of this particular attempt to represent it.- Slate
- Posted Apr 11, 2025
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Dana Stevens
If the latest escapade is not quite as sparkling as its predecessors—in 2021, the second entry briefly surpassed Citizen Kane as one of the highest-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes—it retains their warmhearted and cheekily funny spirit.- Slate
- Posted Feb 13, 2025
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Dana Stevens
Sadly, You’re Cordially Invited eventually founders on the same rocky shores as many recent attempts to revive the rom-com.- Slate
- Posted Jan 30, 2025
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Sam Adams
Mufasa was almost inevitably destined to be Barry Jenkins’ worst movie, and it is. But it’s not a black mark on his record, just a blank space on the timeline.- Slate
- Posted Dec 18, 2024
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Dana Stevens
Scene by scene, there’s nothing not to enjoy about this lushly animated ode to exploration, teamwork, and pluck, especially if you’re a parent of small kids on the hunt for a fun family outing. But for all its verve and polish, Moana 2 seems more like a consumer product, in some subtle but unmistakable way, than the first film did.- Slate
- Posted Nov 26, 2024
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Dana Stevens
Gladiator 2 (or as it’s spelled in the opening title, GladIIator) sadly comes off as less a reinvention of the original than a curiously literal retread of its plot beats, characters, and themes.- Slate
- Posted Nov 18, 2024
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Dana Stevens
McQueen clearly wants to broaden the archetype of stiff-upper-lip Englishness into something more inclusive. It’s a worthy message, but one that sometimes seems to take precedence over the characters and story rather than emerging organically from them.- Slate
- Posted Nov 1, 2024
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens
Fly Me to the Moon’s foundational silliness could have been compensated for, and maybe even turned into the premise for a lightweight but charming romance, if not for two things: the failure to grapple with the larger historical implications of the fake-moon-landing subplot, and the fatal miscasting of Johansson and Tatum as oil-and-water opposites.- Slate
- Posted Jul 11, 2024
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Dana Stevens
Despite its impressive attention to craft—including exquisite motion-capture work by the groundbreaking digital-design studio WETA—Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never fully establishes its reason for being.- Slate
- Posted May 9, 2024
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Dana Stevens
As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.- Slate
- Posted Nov 16, 2023
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Dana Stevens
If Asteroid City had kept its focus more tightly on these two troubled families, it might have turned into the most emotionally truthful movie Anderson has yet made. Instead the story widens out to include a sprawling cast of less complex, if often amusing, secondary characters.- Slate
- Posted Jun 15, 2023
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Dan Kois
The problem with Elemental is that it is, in every way, the epitome of a Pixar film, except that it isn’t any good.- Slate
- Posted Jun 14, 2023
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens
To the film’s credit, nothing in Paint comes off as mean-spirited or patronizing, including the treatment of the town’s many less-than-sophisticated consumers of televised artmaking. But by the last half, the ambient niceness felt so pervasive and the film’s ultimate purpose so vague that, even when the performances and much of the dialogue remained sharp and funny, the movie around them seemed to dissolve into one of those happy little clouds.- Slate
- Posted Apr 7, 2023
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Laura Miller
Every era, accordingly, tends to create an Emily Brontë in its own image, and Frances O’Connor’s film Emily is a prime example of this: beautifully photographed, preoccupied with its heroine’s fragility, and deeply silly.- Slate
- Posted Feb 17, 2023
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens
To the disappointment of this once-enthusiastic ogler, Magic Mike’s Last Dance fails to capture the eponymous magic of the first two very different but both delightful movies.- Slate
- Posted Feb 8, 2023
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens
Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.- Slate
- Posted Jan 20, 2023
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Dana Stevens
His passion is infectious and his enthusiasm for environmental causes commendable, but the movie’s metaphysical and sociological aspirations sometimes come off as cringe-inducingly similar to those that might be expressed by a white lady running a healing-crystal shop in a seaside town.- Slate
- Posted Dec 15, 2022
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Dana Stevens
Fraser’s all-in commitment to playing Charlie—300-pound fatsuit and all—put me in mind of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, an act of faith so complete it managed to be the only transcendent element of a thuddingly bad movie. But Fraser’s beautifully judged performance isn’t enough to save this abject wallow through a mire of maudlin clichés about trauma and redemption.- Slate
- Posted Dec 1, 2022
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Dana Stevens
While it’s frequently moving and occasionally thrilling, the gears sometimes grind audibly on the shift in between.- Slate
- Posted Nov 10, 2022
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens
Though it wears out its welcome in one dreary stretch midway through, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (which premieres on the free, ad-supported streaming service the Roku Channel on Friday) is an appropriately goofy tribute to its subject and co-creator: a movie parody about the life of a parodist.- Slate
- Posted Nov 3, 2022
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Dana Stevens
Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away.- Slate
- Posted Sep 19, 2022
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Dana Stevens
For the most part, Three Thousand Years of Longing reads not as an unintended allegory of contemporary race relations but as a thoughtful, melancholy, and sometimes mordantly funny celebration of the time-and-space-collapsing power of storytelling.- Slate
- Posted Aug 25, 2022
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Dana Stevens
It’s Pitt’s wry presence, and his playful relationship to his own movie-star persona, that provides a still center amidst the CGI-smeared chaos and keeps this train from (metaphorically at least) going off the rails.- Slate
- Posted Aug 4, 2022
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Dana Stevens
Sharp Stick is less a movie than a symptom, a tangle of would-be feminist ideas that, let us hope, needed to be gotten out of its creator’s system so she could get back to making something good- Slate
- Posted Jul 29, 2022
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Dana Stevens
If this particular franchise’s material feels at times a bit thin to be spun out even to two hours, it may be simply that three solo movies per Avenger is more than enough. But this weekend, if the lure of an air-conditioned summer blockbuster summons you like a sacred Asgardian hammer, you could do worse than this Easter egg–colored, classic rock–scored frolic.- Slate
- Posted Jul 7, 2022
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Dana Stevens
There’s a rueful irony to the fact that it’s this supposedly human inspiration for the beloved toy who feels more like a plastic action figure.- Slate
- Posted Jun 17, 2022
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Obviously, one film cannot encompass everything, and as the filmmakers have themselves noted, RRR is sheer fantasy. I cannot fault viewers for enjoying RRR so much, whether they ironically lap up the superhuman stunts or get swept up in the thrilling anti-imperial action. I’m concerned more about the timing of it all, the global presence, the recipe for viral success that other filmmakers will be eyeing. It’s an ingenious form of soft-power propaganda, one that can be interpreted as positively asserting an otherwise-marginalized ideology.- Slate
- Posted Jun 10, 2022
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens
At 137 minutes, The Northman can feel ponderously crammed with both mystic visions (however hauntingly rendered) and Mel Gibson–grade sadistic gore. Somewhere around the two-hour point, the endless bone-crunching battle scenes—while impeccably choreographed and breathtakingly shot in fluid long takes—start to become existentially wearying and even morally suspect.- Slate
- Posted Apr 25, 2022
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It’s not that I wish Aline took more advantage of its fictional liberties to mock or undermine Céline Dion. I just wish it had much more to say about something—such as child stardom, what it’s like to move from working-class margins to opulence, or the simultaneously reverent and condescending relationship that pop culture had with Dion at her 1990s peak- Slate
- Posted Apr 11, 2022
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Dana Stevens
The fact that Marry Me contains anything so formulaic as a third-act separation montage should spell out clearly what you’re getting in for.- Slate
- Posted Feb 11, 2022
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Dana Stevens
I Want You Back is a sometimes underwhelming vehicle for Day and Slate’s considerable comic talents, but it’s a pleasure to spend two hours in their company.- Slate
- Posted Feb 11, 2022
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Dana Stevens
In a late scene in House of Gucci, one character labels another “a triumph of mediocrity.” That paradox and others like it might be applied to the movie itself: It is a glamorous slog, a fabulous bore, a pointlessly bespoke bit of silliness.- Slate
- Posted Nov 24, 2021
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- Posted Nov 22, 2021
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Dana Stevens
The film, scripted by Zhao, Patrick Burleigh, and Ryan and Kaz Firpo, weaves plenty of jokes in with long stretches of intergalactic hocus pocus and equally long action set pieces. But the parts only sporadically cohere into anything like a whole.- Slate
- Posted Oct 27, 2021
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Dana Stevens
This film is a curiously paradoxical achievement: a visual and aural marvel that is also a crashing bore.- Slate
- Posted Oct 21, 2021
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Dana Stevens
If Affleck and Driver at times appear to be on loan from a different, dopier movie, possibly one involving Monty Python, they both have such a cape-swooshing, mustache-twirling good time that it’s hard to blame them for going all in on their characters’ villainy.- Slate
- Posted Oct 13, 2021
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Sam Adams
The movie can’t compete with the Missions: Impossible and Fast and Furiouses for visual spectacle, so what it offers by way of compensatory heft is a tangled plot full of double-crosses and hidden identities, combined with a ponderous gait that suggests that more than the mere world is at stake.- Slate
- Posted Sep 30, 2021
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Dana Stevens
The movie seems to love its main character without bothering to understand her.- Slate
- Posted Sep 16, 2021
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Karen Han
Kate gestures at being different, something fresh and subversive, but at the end of the day, it’s just reheating old clichés.- Slate
- Posted Sep 14, 2021
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Dana Stevens
The first hour of Candyman does a bang-up job of mixing such audience-teasing popcorn thrills with trenchant, if sometimes too flatly stated, social critique. But by the last half-hour, there are so many themes, plotlines, and flashbacks in play that the movie’s message becomes muddled, and the forward momentum slows.- Slate
- Posted Aug 26, 2021
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Sam Adams
A New Legacy is much slicker and more appealing than the original Space Jam, in no small part because James is approximately 50 times the actor Jordan is. But it’s also because corporations handing a bag of unrelated IP and ordering screenwriters to come up with a story around them is the template for most studio filmmaking now, if not all of contemporary existence.- Slate
- Posted Jul 19, 2021
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Rebecca Onion
The movie is at its best when it can revel in inventiveness, scrappiness, and camaraderie, and you feel the “We’re coming together! We’re beating the Big Bad!” vibes run through you.- Slate
- Posted Jun 30, 2021
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Dana Stevens
Especially if you’re watching with children, you could spend a perfectly lovely afternoon diving into Luca’s refreshing blue-green waters. But unlike the two fish-kid buddies at the movie’s center, you may not emerge from the experience transformed.- Slate
- Posted Jun 16, 2021
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Karen Han
All in all, Cruella is much better than it needs to be, and is hampered primarily by the fact that it’s a Disney movie, both in the sense that it has to heel to its animated and live-action predecessors, and in that making its main character a genuine antihero isn’t an option.- Slate
- Posted May 26, 2021
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Jack Hamilton
If you’re a Biggie die-hard (I’m one), nothing in I Got a Story to Tell will trouble your conviction that everything you already thought you knew about Biggie Smalls is right. In other words, it’s fan service, a project that sees “what is this movie for” and “who is this movie for” as effectively the same question.- Slate
- Posted Mar 1, 2021
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Karen Han
Always and Forever boasts all of the Instagram-filter-style color grading and absurdly beautiful sets that fans have come to expect, as well as a soundtrack of suitably romantic pop songs—but it’s the last bite of a meal you’re already full from. You’re used to the flavors, and there’s nothing in the dish that surprises you anymore. If comfort is your aim, look no further, but to keep any franchise or genre alive, sometimes you need some fresh ingredients.- Slate
- Posted Feb 12, 2021
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Karen Han
Gorō is a talented director. The individual shots of Earwig are beautifully composed, the characters are delightful (the tiny demons who wait upon Mandrake seem destined to become merchandise hits), and the film’s flimsy plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the visuals sink the entire enterprise.- Slate
- Posted Feb 1, 2021
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Dana Stevens
Hathaway and Ejiofor seem excited to play edgier, less nice people than they often get the chance to, and the early scenes of them locking horns in their claustrophobic (if posh) flat generate enough energy to carry the movie almost all the way over the finish line.- Slate
- Posted Jan 13, 2021
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Laura Miller
Glossy, handsomely mounted, with ample footage of mist-swathed Cornish cliffs, this adaptation is all still waters and no depth.- Slate
- Posted Oct 19, 2020
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Sam Adams
Irresistible might be a movie for the moment before or the moment after, but it feels entirely out of step with the one it’s in.- Slate
- Posted Jun 22, 2020
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Sam Adams
It has a loping, lowkey charm and doesn’t require too much of your attention, and the plot is predictable enough that you could miss substantial chunks of it and not lose your way. You’re in the passenger seat, and it’s a nice ride as long as you don’t care where you’re going.- Slate
- Posted Jun 8, 2020
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Sam Adams
Trolls World Tour was made to play in theaters that can’t open, celebrating a kind of performance that’s on indefinite hold. All I could feel watching its climax was how much I miss that feeling of being together in the dark, and how long it’ll be before it feels safe to do it again.- Slate
- Posted Apr 14, 2020
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Dan Kois
Wendy recognizably reflects Zeitlin’s vision; it’s less a follow-up to "Beasts" than a kind of echo of it. The mistakes the movie makes, and the ways it fails to fulfill its predecessor’s promise, make me want to say something critics rarely express: I wish that the studio had meddled a little bit more.- Slate
- Posted Feb 25, 2020
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Jack Hamilton
Once Were Brothers could have been a peacemaking gesture, a magnanimous work of reflection and tribute that would gather Robertson some belated goodwill, and the film’s first half makes some moves in that direction. But damned if that hatchet just won’t stay buried.- Slate
- Posted Feb 20, 2020
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Sam Adams
Birds of Prey often leaves you puttering around the edges, being grateful for its modest achievements: fight scenes that are, if not exciting, at least coherently staged, and Robbie’s comic timing, which is so often sharper than the lines she has to deliver.- Slate
- Posted Feb 7, 2020
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Sam Adams
A documentary about one of the most mediated, image-conscious people on the planet sounds like an oxymoron, and though director Lana Wilson is no hagiographer, Miss Americana is hardly warts-and-all.- Slate
- Posted Jan 27, 2020
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Marissa Martinelli
It’s 80-year-old Ian McKellen who can best answer that last question, having the most fun of anyone as Gus the Theater Cat, lapping out of saucers and rubbing up against corners like the true thespian he is. And really, for all its flaws, what more could you possibly ask for from Cats?- Slate
- Posted Dec 18, 2019
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Sam Adams
It’s frenzied, briefly infuriating, and eventually, grudgingly, satisfying, but it’s like being force-fed fandom: Your belly is filled, but there’s no pleasure in the meal.- Slate
- Posted Dec 18, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
The needless cruelty of the criminal justice system feels like a world begging for more sense-making, but Just Mercy only sees its characters as heroes, victims, or obstacles, not as rational beings who might have their own reasons to knowingly commit terrible acts. Cretton’s desire to focus tightly on McMillian’s case makes sense, but he accidentally makes the white malefactors in the town more fascinating for their villainy.- Slate
- Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Dana Stevens
There’s something to admire in the pedal-to-the-metal commitment of their project, and certainly Uncut Gems is the product of an uncompromising vision. But I found the result to be claustrophobic and, finally, dull, with scene after scene that hammers home the same point we understood from the very beginning: that Howard is a lost soul, fated to run both his business and personal life into the ground.- Slate
- Posted Dec 10, 2019
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Dana Stevens
Whatever beliefs they may hold about other people’s humanity, I’m glad these women finally received justice from the network that wronged them. I’m just not sure that translates into wanting to spend two hours in their company.- Slate
- Posted Dec 9, 2019
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Sam Adams
Frozen 2 doesn’t have its forebear’s ungainliness; in many ways, it’s more efficiently engineered. But it’s also far less surprising, even taking into account that a sequel’s first task is to give people what they expect.- Slate
- Posted Nov 20, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
Where Charlie’s Angels really falters, though, is in the jokes, as Banks is the only actress on screen with any real comic chops. One can’t help wondering what might’ve been if she’d concerned herself more with being her weird self and less with trying to make every woman in the audience feel validated.- Slate
- Posted Nov 14, 2019
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Sam Adams
Flanagan is more faithful to "The Shining" than he was to Shirley Jackson’s "Hill House," but he ends each with a twist that functions as a smug reproach.- Slate
- Posted Nov 6, 2019
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Dana Stevens
Speaking for myself, I’m fine with the concept of terminating The Terminator — and there’s no need to blue-orb back any more augmented hitmen or - women to do it.- Slate
- Posted Oct 25, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
Dolemite Is My Name delivers on titties, funnies, and kung fu, all mixed up in a syrupy nostalgia that makes the picture’s feel-good populism go down easy. It’s only when the credits roll that you might notice there was little there but froth.- Slate
- Posted Oct 3, 2019
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Isaac Butler
This Hal can only mumble resentfully in one language. It’s the language of “serious” male cinema in the year 2019, where seething resentment gives forth to bursts of violence. In deciding to speak this language instead of Shakespeare’s, Michôd has taken two of the Bard’s immortal geniuses, the drunkard Falstaff and his protégé, the Prince, and shrunk them down to the size of everyday people.- Slate
- Posted Oct 2, 2019
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Heather Schwedel
The movie, even at two-and-a-half hours long, can’t fit in as much as does the 800-page novel, forcing director John Crowley and screenwriter Peter Straughan to pare down a bit on details, characters, and plot.- Slate
- Posted Sep 14, 2019
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What director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman do with this opening murder — not to mention a bizarre subplot that appears designed to counterweigh it — exploits a ghastly real-life killing for a cheap shock, delivered without context or any clear thematic underpinning. It’s obvious they failed to fully reckon with what they’ve put on the screen, and the results are grim.- Slate
- Posted Sep 6, 2019
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In another era, the film’s postmodern affectations might have been more entertaining, but in the current era, the enterprise feels a little more sinister.- Slate
- Posted Aug 14, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
It’s not that One Child Nation needs to cater to both sides of the argument, but it would have helped contextualize how often the acts of violence the film chronicles actually happened.- Slate
- Posted Aug 9, 2019
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Reviewed by
Sam Adams
Hobbs & Shaw is a ridiculous movie, and sometimes it’s in the best way. I laughed at the audacity of its stunts, while shaking my head a little bit at their silliness. But I also despaired a little bit when I checked the time at what felt like it might be the climax and discovered there was still an hour to go.- Slate
- Posted Jul 31, 2019
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Dana Stevens
It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements — the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees — were just so cool.- Slate
- Posted Jul 25, 2019
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Dana Stevens
Uncanny singing animals aside, a secondary effect of the film’s commitment to zoological verisimilitude is to place the voice actors in a relatively powerless position. It’s a strange choice to assemble an all-star cast from various walks of celebrity—actors, pop singers, rappers, comedians—and then make their only contribution a verbal one.- Slate
- Posted Jul 11, 2019
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Sam Adams
Far From Home, which brings back Homecoming director Jon Watts and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, sometimes strains to match the intensity of the all-out battles in its dialogue scenes, and there are too many exchanges where characters reel off a dozen overlapping half-jokes in the hopes that you’ll come away with the feeling something funny was said.- Slate
- Posted Jun 28, 2019
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- Posted Jun 14, 2019
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It’s not a terrible place for the Fox X-Men series to end. But it doesn’t feel like the Dark Phoenix Saga. For that, we’ll always have comics.- Slate
- Posted Jun 11, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
Late Night suggests that Kaling is as fascinated as ever not by the girl next door but by powerful, unruly women — and the unconventional love stories befitting their willful, idiosyncratic selves. But the film may be most notable for its summation of the thinking and rethinking that Kaling has done about her 15 years in Hollywood — and how to fight to change it.- Slate
- Posted Jun 5, 2019
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The movie, sorry to say, can’t quite keep up that swagger. Instead, Rocketman mostly proceeds with studious fidelity through the stations of the rocker biopic, with only a few formal tweaks to the formula.- Slate
- Posted Jun 1, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
The script relies too often on Sasha’s bestie or Marcus’ father pushing the destined couple toward each other, but its smaller moments of naturalistic riffing make up for the rigid plotting.- Slate
- Posted May 30, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
Maybe this dream team would be better showcased by a "Tea With the Dames" situation, in which they were allowed to toss out the script and booze it up as their own funny selves. Anyone else up for Chardonnay With the Comedians?- Slate
- Posted May 11, 2019
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Sam Adams
Despite its sizable budget, Detective Pikachu has a similarly run-down quality. What story there is barely makes sense, and it feels as if large chunks have been taken out at random. But in a world packed full of franchise-extending would-be blockbusters, there’s something strangely appealing about its patchiness.- Slate
- Posted May 8, 2019
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Matthew Dessem
The nudges and winks in Dumbo about Disney’s predatory practices are an invitation from filmmaker to audience to share a knowing chuckle over the essential soullessness of the entire enterprise.- Slate
- Posted Mar 28, 2019
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Dana Stevens
Captain Marvel sometimes resembles the kind of low-budget sci-fi that might have played on kids’ TV on a Saturday afternoon in the era when this movie is set.- Slate
- Posted Mar 6, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
If you like postmodern gimmickry and modern dance, and are OK with sitting through nearly 10 minutes of staged talking-head interviews, glum stoner talk about abortion, nausea-inducing filmmaking, characters whose motivations don’t make sense, horror, exploitative child death, and a quasi-coercive lesbian make-out—but just don’t care to be reminded “Drugs! Are! Bad!”: Leave 89 minutes in. Or don’t come at all, because Climax really isn’t about anything more than that.- Slate
- Posted Mar 5, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
Despite the production’s team of scientist consultants, the physics in The Wandering Earth is probably a lot of hooey. But the film’s world building, which takes up much of its first third, is undeniably novel and fascinating. Rarely does a film brag such a technocratic heart.- Slate
- Posted Feb 22, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
Natalie might protest the whitewashing of New York by rom-coms, but Isn’t It Romantic trots out multiple supporting characters of color whose sole roles are to make the white protagonist look good.- Slate
- Posted Feb 13, 2019
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Sam Adams
Like last year’s "Ralph Breaks the Internet," the movie evolves into a parable about toxic masculinity and the danger of mistaking darkness for depth, but Lego Movie 2’s frequent flips to the real world subject its underlying text to a scrutiny it can’t bear, and take the fun out of reading between the lines. Lord and Miller have always known what they’re doing, but here it feels like they need you to know it, too.- Slate
- Posted Feb 8, 2019
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Inkoo Kang
The sum amounts to far less than its parts, but oh, what parts!- Slate
- Posted Feb 5, 2019
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Sam Adams
It’s also hard not to judge it against the movie it might have been. In 2000, Unbreakable felt like an anomaly, a superhero movie that steered clear of camp and dug into the genre’s bedrock. It could have been thrilling to extend that approach into 2019, where superheroes storm the multiplex on a monthly basis, and there’s no longer a need to laboriously explain the culture behind them. Unfortunately, it seems that laborious explanations are the part Shyamalan likes. He’s the evil mastermind detailing his plot for world domination, knowing that the villain’s monologue is a terrible cliché but unable to resist the urge.- Slate
- Posted Jan 9, 2019
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