Slate's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 2,129 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 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: 100 One Battle After Another
Lowest review score: 0 15 Minutes
Score distribution:
2129 movie reviews
  1. It's a loosely bound collection of miscellany filmed at the McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person settlement of researchers in Antarctica, during the five-month "austral summer" of round-the-clock sunlight. Herzog was sent to Antarctica by the National Science Foundation with carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted--all he could tell them for sure was that it wouldn't involve penguins.
  2. My only problem with Mongol is that--how often in life do you get to write this sentence?---Genghis Khan is a little too nice.
  3. And an attempt to address the series' endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character--Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's designer-bag-toting Girl Friday--is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine's oblivious entitlement
  4. Even the most enthusiastic future Indy scholar would have to concede that the movie's habit of quoting from venerable Hollywood antiquities sometimes has the unfortunate effect of reminding the viewer that those movies were better.
  5. They may make for clunky religious parables, but the Narnia books--and so far, the movies based on them--are wonderful as stories about childhood and its loss.
  6. The feature debut of young Norwegian director Joachim Trier, is as crisp and cool as a swig of Champagne.
  7. The state of mind brought on by Speed Racer the movie is more akin to that phenomenon by which young infants, exposed to more stimuli than their systems are equipped to handle, will simply shut down.
  8. Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.
  9. When it's idling in neutral, and we're watching Stark putter in his workshop or seduce unsuspecting journalists, Iron Man abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm.
  10. Son of Rambow bristles with the anarchic energy of late childhood and a genuine respect for the life-changing power of movies--even (or especially) the schlocky ones.
  11. Baby Mama is the most disappointing movie of the year so far--which, granted, isn't saying a lot in mid-April.
  12. It betrays the spirit of the stoner comedy, which has traditionally been subversive--when it wasn't detailing the love affair between two marginally functional young men and their stash of sweet, sweet herb.
  13. While Morris isn't interested in exonerating anyone, he clearly sympathizes to some degree with the MPs and deplores the military's fall-guy strategy, which punished these seven soldiers as exemplary "bad apples" while leaving all higher-ranking officers untouched.
  14. Like its hero, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a little soft around the middle, but all the more loveable for that.
  15. With his goofy interview technique and easy laugh, Spurlock has a way of putting his subjects at ease even as he tests the audience's patience.
  16. As tough as Lawrence is to like, Smart People is even harder to hate, mainly because of the sharply observed script by novelist Mark Jude Poirier. Just when you're losing patience with the movie, it sneaks up on you with a poignant detail or a character-defining turn of phrase.
  17. There's something cynical about Ayer's attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law. You can't lionize your "Dirty Harry" vigilante and expose his hypocrisy, too.
  18. Better than a finger in your eye. It's a perfectly passable, if instantly forgettable, date movie, lushly shot by Newton Thomas Sigel and with a script intelligently versed in American classics like "His Girl Friday" and "Hail the Conquering Hero."
  19. There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.
  20. Drillbit Taylor is slackly paced and rife with questionable logic.
  21. Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat.
  22. In terms of character development, wit, and simple curiosity, it's dumber than a Neanderthal.
  23. Married Life is a tony, well-upholstered vehicle that glides smoothly toward its destination—but despite an unnecessary and overly sentimental coda, that destination isn't necessarily where you thought you were going all along.
  24. For a movie whose story hinges almost entirely on sex, The Other Boleyn Girl is disappointingly demure.
  25. An unambiguous celebration of the state of preadolescent fixation. The movie is perhaps best understood as a 12-year-old boy: You want to give it a hug and then yell at it to pick up after itself.
  26. Hardly top-drawer Romero. In fact, it may be his worst zombie film yet. But even bad Romero is a far sight more interesting than the coolly sadistic guts-porn that currently passes for mainstream horror.
  27. Jumper not only makes the rules up as it goes along; it neglects to tell us what those rules are, which is both unfair and unfun.
  28. It's a delicate parable, droll rather than funny, wise rather than smart. Eran Kolirin, debuting as a writer-director, has the deadpan sparseness of the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, but his vision is gentler, less bleak; at moments, the movie is almost sentimental, but the performances save it every time.
  29. A jolly mess of a movie. Overplotted, choppy, and contrived, it nonetheless has a curious vitality that makes you wonder where McDonagh will go next.
  30. Rambo combines an unapologetic return to the grand action-movie tradition of blowing shit up (one explosion is so big, it leaves behind its own miniature mushroom cloud) with a "Saw"-era interest in close-ups of human viscera.

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