Nick Schager, Slant Magazine
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For 63 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 20% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 77% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 18.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Nick Schager's Scores

  • Movies
Average review score: 41
Highest review score:
The Lords of Salem
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Vampires Suck
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 63
  2. Mixed: 39 out of 63
  3. Negative: 20 out of 63
63 movie reviews
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    • Metascore: 70
    • Nick Schager 40
    Queen to Play
    Queen to Play does slightly buck convention by depicting intellectual development (rather than lovey-dovey triumph) as the key to reshaping identity, as well as a form of class advancement and spiritual enlightenment. Such notions, however, are drowned out by deafeningly creaky conventions of cutesy self-discovery.
    • Metascore: 53
    • Nick Schager 40
    Jig
    Class, gender and ethnic issues get pushed to the sidelines in favor of rote who-will-win suspense; all that finger-crossing and Lucky Charms flavoring, however, doesn't keep Jig from being just another in a long line of nonfiction soft-shoe routines.
    • Metascore: 49
    • Nick Schager 40
    The Mighty Macs
    It's a saga whose clichéd corniness would be practically sinful if not for the mighty Gugino, who almost counteracts the material's pap with megawatt charm and steel-tough resolve - exemplified by a low-angled intro shot of the poised, strutting, tight-sweater-sexy actress.
    • Metascore: 49
    • Nick Schager 40
    Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    The repeated sight of people watching video monitors or communicating with others via laptops becomes a stilted, gimmicky affectation, and there are only so many times you can watch a camera panning and zooming over still photos before your tolerance for the Ken Burns effect reaches its limit.
    • Metascore: 63
    • Nick Schager 40
    Revenge of the Electric Car
    The documentary soon becomes just a chronologically structured update of continuing progress, one that functions like a mildly engaging but generally inconclusive "Time" magazine feature. Anybody throwing the word revenge around right now is being a tad premature.
    • Metascore: 40
    • Nick Schager 40
    The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    Whether sleuthing or smacking around thugs, Sisley makes a dashing hero, but this glossy action flick is heavy on tedious convolutions and depressingly light on character depth, suspense or political-economic intrigue.
    • Metascore: 37
    • Nick Schager 40
    1911
    The star and co-director appears hopelessly out of place, trapped in a variety of awkward-fitting uniforms while forced to offer up laughably obvious battlefield advice ("Avoid gunfire!").
    • Metascore: 33
    • Nick Schager 40
    The Greening of Whitney Brown
    Content to be a typical piece of tween rural-versus-urban fluff from the old Hannah Montana: The Movie mold. Such lazy complacency is almost enough to make you see red.
    • Metascore: 38
    • Nick Schager 40
    Angels Crest
    No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.
    • Metascore: 51
    • Nick Schager 40
    Peeples
    Defined by "Three’s Company"–grade humor, this attempt at male-anxiety cringe-comedy is little more than a sitcom writ large that — courtesy of several awkward transitional fades to black — already feels constructed to accommodate commercial breaks.
    • Metascore: 30
    • Nick Schager 40
    My Way
    The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.
    • Metascore: 43
    • Nick Schager 40
    Backwards
    The lesson here, apparently, is that driven women just need to lighten up and stop being selfish - a message that really does feel backward.
    • Metascore: 45
    • Nick Schager 40
    Waiting for Lightning
    Director Jacob Rosenberg's approach is heavy with archival footage and interviews, yet oddly features almost nothing from Way himself; his puzzling absence for most of the film turns the project into less of a biography than a one-note hagiography.
    • Metascore: 40
    • Nick Schager 38
    X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The action is perfunctory and forgettable, albeit no more so than the script's range of clichés.
    • Metascore: 25
    • Nick Schager 20
    Case 39
    From a bevy of cheesy jolt scares (alarm clock! barking dog!) to the embarrassing sight of Zellweger and Ian McShane treating this Orphan-style B-movie silliness with grave seriousness, the film proves to be one hokey-horror riot.
    Read full review
    • Metascore: 30
    • Nick Schager 20
    Finding Bliss
    It's the wooden plotting and cornball sentimentality--and, most unpleasant of all, the full-frontal nudity of Jamie Kennedy--that truly make this AVN-themed fairy tale, ahem, hard to swallow
    Read full review
    • Metascore: 39
    • Nick Schager 20
    Inhale
    Even with the grungy aesthetics and earnest preaching, Inhale is really nothing but crass topical exploitation, milking this social issue for every salacious drop.
    • Metascore: 22
    • Nick Schager 20
    One for the Money
    Flirty bickering is rampant but, courtesy of Heigl's inert performance, there's no heat or humor to the proceedings, just an avalanche of grating big-hair-and-bad-accent New Joisey caricatures.
    • Metascore: 20
    • Nick Schager 20
    Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    Further marred by second-rate 3-D and the sort of cornball one-liners that even a fairy godmother couldn't love, it's a tolerance-testing tale that puts the grim in Grimm.
    • Metascore: 33
    • Nick Schager 20
    Cat Run
    It's simply one wearisome '90s crime-cinema cliché after another.
    • Metascore: 51
    • Nick Schager 20
    Meet Monica Velour
    The film succeeds only in turning one's stomach via implausibilities, inanities and the unwelcome sight of Brian Dennehy's naked ass.
    • Metascore: 25
    • Nick Schager 20
    The Big Bang
    Agent-turned-director Tony Krantz has a penchant for stylization that quickly slides into a velvet-painting cheesiness, which-along with the script's pseudoprofound Philosophy 101 maxims-renders the atmosphere less noirish than ridiculously cartoonish.
    • Metascore: 57
    • Nick Schager 20
    Daydream Nation
    Michael Goldbach's pretentious take on identity development is woefully lacking in either subversive humor or genuine pathos; the overwrought end-of-the-world backdrop of a rampaging serial killer and a toxic industrial fire only poisons the concoction further.
    • Metascore: 22
    • Nick Schager 20
    A Love Affair of Sorts
    Self-aware narcissism has rarely been this unjustified-or insufferable.
    • Metascore: 46
    • Nick Schager 20
    Habermann
    Based on a true story that culminated with the expulsion of 3 million Germans from Czechoslovakia, the film leaps through years with a rapidity that negates a good deal of its sweep.
    • Metascore: 27
    • Nick Schager 20
    Tyler Perry's Temptation
    That sort of fire-and-brimstone morality dominates this one-note sermon, which pairs its pedantic preaching with the campiness of Vanessa Williams speaking in an absurd French accent and Kim Kardashian as the protagonist’s bitchy fashionista coworker, vainly trying to act.
    • Metascore: 19
    • Nick Schager 20
    After Fall, Winter
    While it may make the City of Light look beautiful, ultimately, this insufferable indie auteur's navel-gazer is just another faux-kinky vanity project in which its creator's neuroses are placed on an undeserved pedestal.
    • Metascore: 44
    • Nick Schager 20
    Life Happens
    Something happens here, but it isn't life.
    • Metascore: 41
    • Nick Schager 20
    Jesus Henry Christ
    Why anyone would want to spend time with a foursome whose bathetic misery is, like the overly mannered visuals of writer-director Dennis Lee (Fireflies in the Garden), defined by such insufferable quirkiness is anyone's guess.
    • Metascore: 50
    • Nick Schager 20
    A Bag of Hammers
    The real scam was the filmmakers tricking Rebecca Hall (and a cameoing Amanda Seyfried) into participating in this blunt instrument of an indie.
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