Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 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: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. Hard to Be a God
    Aleksei German's final film is choreographed with a Felliniesque social grandeur, but tethered to a neorealist's eye for detail and quotidian matters of social justice.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    An American Werewolf in London
    The film’s indisputable centerpiece is the protracted werewolf transformation sequence.
  3. Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
    With Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.
  4. The Turin Horse
    Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he (along with co-director Ágnes Hranitzky) dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus.
  5. Do the Right Thing
    Lee deftly follows the actions of two dozen people on what turns out to be one of the longest, hottest, most memorable and maybe most tragic days of their lives. And he does it without so much as a single lugubrious or extraneous moment.
  6. Day of the Dead
    Here, a pessimistic Romero dares to tackle the very essence of man’s inhumanity to man. And in the end, Day of the Dead is every bit as compelling and unsettling as its more lauded predecessors.
  7. Mommie Dearest
    Inscrutably powerful and brutally honest about diva worship as another form of male domination, Mommie Dearest is to camp what Medea was to Dr. Benjamin Spock.
  8. Rosemary's Baby
    Rosemary’s Baby is one of horror cinema’s all-time slow burns, drawing viewers gradually into entertaining the possibility that the movie’s series of strange coincidences and accumulating sense of dread are only subjective representations of Rosemary’s unraveling mental state.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Medium Cool
    Medium Cool stages, not so much with voguish nihilism, despite its demonstrably downbeat ending, as dispassionate vérité straightforwardness, the growing pains that strain a nation when the countercultural ideal of limitless possibility matures into something closer to political reality.
  10. Underground
    Underground is a unique blend of lowbrow slapstick and sophisticated war commentary, earning it well-deserved comparisons to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be and Not To Be (possibly the funniest movie ever made) and the films of Abbott and Costello.
  11. Apocalypse Now Redux
    With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.
  12. I Am Cuba
    I Am Cuba is a cinephile’s wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn’t so humane.
  13. Singin' in the Rain
    Many things reinforce the enduring greatness of Singin’ in the Rain, but its most charming element is the filmmakers’ love for and dedication to the basic tenants of cinema as pure enchantment, and an open indulgence of all the bells and whistles that have been allowed it to grow into something bigger and (arguably) better over the decades.
  14. Rebecca
    A key film in Alfred Hitchcock’s evolution as a master explorer of sexual neuroses.
  15. Mulholland Dr.
    Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.
  16. Ghost World
    Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.
  17. The Tales of Hoffmann
    Though lacking the thematic depth that characterized the Archers’ earlier work, The Tales of Hoffmann ranks among their finest triumphs for its purely aesthetic self-justification.
  18. Museum Hours
    Jem Cohen's film finds its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects.
  19. Phoenix
    Christian Petzold never luxuriates in all this film history, but rather channels the artifice and affect it embodies into new insights.
  20. Our Body
    Our Body offers, in its unwavering commitment to staring at the fragility of life in the eye, a solace devoid of romanticism or spiritual self-delusion.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Breathless
    What remains most striking, and most moving, about Godard’s first feature is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism.
  22. Koyaanisqatsi
    Koyaanisqatsi is enraged with modern societal convention, but still expresses awe of the spontaneous, incidental poetry that can exist despite invisible oppression.
  23. Sorcerer
    Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.
  24. The Passion of Joan of Arc
    The Passion of Joan of Arc remains the moment that [Dreyer] guided his medium to new heights, and also crafted a work that would endure outside of any specific context.
  25. Fireworks
    It’s a weird experience that Kitano is offering to movie audiences: We thrill to the violent, heroic exploits that leave many a pierced eyeball, many a severed limb, many a bullet-riddled corpse, but we find uplift in his celebration of community, music, dance, light, color, and companionship.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Scarecrow
    Scarecrow embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon.
  27. Madam Phung's Last Journey
    With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Circus
    It is Chaplin’s great elegy to the lost art of music-hall pantomime and, for that matter, the soon-to-be lost art of silent-film comedy.
  29. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    The film is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence.
  30. Lord of the Flies
    Brook renders savagery with the despairing eye of a humanist, and with the irresolvable ambivalence of an artist.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Conversation
    A shout-out to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America’s body politic in the era of Watergate.
  32. Queen of Earth
    Every beautiful, resonant image in writer-director Alex Ross Perry's film is fraught with neurotic, diaphanous riddles.
  33. To the Ends of the Earth
    If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it’s because he’s focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tabu
    The pangs of romance, eroticism, anguish, and longing (both for the stolen moments of private passion and for the sense-making schematics of Empire) transcend any period of cinema Tabu may evoke.
  35. Li'l Quinquin
    It resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Bruno Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of Humanité.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. One of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades.
  37. Wild Strawberries
    Initially, Wild Strawberries appears to be an almost pointedly unsubtle coming-of-age story that’s been goosed with dime-store surrealism and male handwringing masked as intellectual engagement with humankind. But the bluntness is a misdirection that underlines the depth of Bergman’s empathy with his hero as well as his dedication to his real subject, which is the process of mentally freeing oneself from an insidiously limiting self-mythology.
  38. Citizen Kane
    I still stare at it, amazed and entertained, but dwarfed by the very idea of attempting to untangle the crow’s nest that has formed through the film’s ever-expanding histories. And what continuously stupefies me is that time works no miracles on this particular film: Scenes remain familiar, but the narrative seems to shift every time I return to it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Marnie
    The film’s themes, along with its avalanche of formal signifiers, are all fused together in the magisterial hunting sequence.
  40. Licorice Pizza
    It’s the hints of danger, employed like ghost notes in a shuffling rhythm, that lend the film its sneaky depth of feeling.
  41. Yojimbo
    Something of a textbook example of the perfect crowd-pleaser, Kurosawa’s tale is sociopolitical wish fulfillment via archetypal samurai drama, albeit with a twist or three.
  42. Playtime
    With Playtime, Tati made one of the most fully inhabitable films ever.
  43. In the Mood for Love
    In the Mood For Love is ravishing beyond mortal words.
  44. You're Next
    Adam Wingard's You're Next brazenly merges the home-invasion thriller with the dysfunctional family dramedy.
  45. Le Samouraï
    Melville’s 1967 masterpiece, which—through assuming the same systematic attention to detail as its iconically cool protagonist—achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty and grace.
  46. Psycho
    Felt in the full impact of a theatrical screening (with the pleasure of seeing patrons reflexively kick or stiffen at the sight of Miles startled by her mirrored reflection), its power is not just that of a showman’s calibrated scare machine, but of a somber fugue on the trapped 20th-century creatures who inhabit its world, clawing but never budging an inch.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nostalghia
    Perhaps Tarkovsky’s most opaque film, Nostalghia is nonetheless one of his most personal.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lifeboat
    Lifeboat is actually much more complicated than it first appears. Its emphasis on moral debates in dialogue can seem a little dry, but Hitchcock’s shifting sympathies guarantee our guilty involvement with the characters until he builds to a climax of intellectual and spiritual excitation.
  49. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Chantal Akerman’s 1975 experiment in film form, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is an astonishing work of subtextual feminism which has to count as one of the seminal films of the 1970s.
  50. Au hasard Balthazar
    Au Hasard Balthazar possesses a strictly balanced, bemused-unto-neigh-indifferent attitude toward delineating between the wry and the glum, the sacred and the profane.
  51. 12 Angry Men
    What's most interesting about the intense deliberations that ensue, specifically when a piece of seemingly indisputable evidence is brought back into question, is how a fresh angle and perspective, usually born from Juror 8's critical thinking, can permanently alter the tone of the discussion.
  52. Imitation of Life
    The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Tin Drum
    The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.
  54. Point Blank
    Though Point Blank is rife with existential malaise, it is also one of the most ferociously sexy crime movies ever made.
  55. Carrie
    Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley whales across Nancy Allen’s face.
  56. Night of the Living Dead
    A stark, eerie and unrelenting parable of dread. There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    House of Games
    His meticulous, largely self-taught directing style—dazzlingly showcased in House of Games, a master class in dramatically functional compositions and camera moves—should be mandatory viewing for any would-be filmmaker.
  58. Suspiria
    Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =
  59. The Shining
    It’s the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror.
  60. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.
  61. North by Northwest
    The picture is hugely pleased with itself, but it’s too funny and expertly calibrated to mind in the least. Both Hitchcock and Grant raise relaxed confidence to masterpiece level here.
  62. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
    What separates Texas Chainsaw Massacre from its predecessors is its anarchic, cynical hysteria—its bizarre and dark-as-hell gallows humor.
  63. Elle
    This is a film that isn’t afraid to inhabit the maddening ambivalence of pleasure, recognizing that desire simply doesn’t recognize good manners.
  64. Queen at Sea
    As much as Binoche is the backbone of Queen at Sea, Courtenay and Calder-Marshall’s raw performances are no less impressive.
  65. Her
    A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality.
  66. Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea initiates a narrative that probes the fundamental gap between wanting to help and actually being able to do so.
  67. Straw Dogs
    Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.
  68. The Color Wheel
    Much like the work of generational cohort Michael Robinson, Alex Ross Perry's films are steeped in a viscous cultural past.
  69. Miss Kiet's Children
    Childhood in Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch's documentary is the terrain of contradiction and ambiguity.
  70. Laurence Anyways
    It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.
  71. The Wind Rises
    Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.
  72. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Every pan and snap zoom and dissolve is exact, every whorl of smoke and wind-thrown swath of leaves pulled from a dream and placed methodically before our eyes.
  73. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    The final passages are the most exultant in their taking us beyond ourselves into a wide-eyed state of untarnished possibilities; entirely without words, the film reminds us that, despite how far we’ve come, the real odyssey has only just begun.
  74. Drug War
    The film is a singularly huge, relentless, all-encompassing set piece that mutates and spasms with terrifying lack of foresight. It's all business, business, business.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Long Day Closes
    The Long Day Closes posits its pubescent protagonist as a tiny camera absorbing and transforming the reality all around him.
  76. The 39 Steps
    Like Rear Window later on, this charming, masterfully made British spy adventure from 1935 is a sigh of doubt, perhaps even a cry of anguish, disguised as a slick pop bauble.
  77. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven brought the revisionist revenge film into the 1990s and, by extension, the 21st century
  78. Monrovia, Indiana
    As always with Frederick Wiseman, it’s the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.
  79. The Wrong Man
    The sense of moral responsibility in Hitchcock’s films may have never felt more imperative and succinct.
  80. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    A torrid journey through the subconscious of a little girl lost, Fire Walk with Me is also a cautionary tale of sorts, the sad chronicle of a sleepy town trying to rid itself of its dirty laundry.
  81. Black Narcissus
    Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
  82. Beginners
    One of the most distinct pleasures of Beginners is the way it puts together fragments of someone's life-presumably the filmmaker's, although little does it matter-with humility, and without vying for some complete whole.
  83. Blow-Up
    Blow-Up is moving and influential for the chasms it understands to exist between people, and for its perception of art as unable to bridge those divides.
  84. The Shop Around the Corner
    The charm of the gimmick in Lubitsch’s take (directing a script by Samuel Raphaelson, who had collaborated with the German-born filmmaker on comedies and melodramas alike) is passed over quickly in favor of studying both its effects on those involved, as well as the dynamics of the workplace at large.
  85. Toy Story
    The film is virtually perfect: Nary a frame goes to waste in the establishment and development of plot and character, with the occasionally deviant touch serving to neutralize a sense of overly manufactured calculation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Room 237
    The doc positions The Shining as a comparably coiled, thematically overflowing microcosm--standing in for cinema, for history, for obsession, for postmodern theory buckling under the film's heft.
  87. Golden Exits
    Alex Ross Perry's characters are shrewd enough to recognize the irrational contours of their lives, which they diagnose and chew over in some of the most inventive, twisty, and richly ironic dialogue in modern American cinema.
  88. Husbands and Wives
    Allen bravely posits one’s fear of change and the comfort in finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind.
  89. A Hard Day's Night
    Even when the band plays away from private eyes or songs simply play over disconnected footage of them having fun, the strength of their songcraft is stirring.
  90. Carlito's Way
    Though the story in Carlito’s Way is treated in a fatalistic sense, the moment-to-moment, frame-to-frame experience is anything but rigid and stodgy from over-determination. It sings, dances, punches, slinks, embeds. It moves like the luxurious tracking shots that punctuate the film.
  91. Inherent Vice
    The dangers of filmmakers trying to replicate a golden era rather than embrace the present are part and parcel of Inherent Vice, but the ramifications are political as well.
  92. Dead Man
    Dead Man is likely Jim Jarmusch’s most stunning achievement.
  93. Opera
    Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    Every musical number works, and the mistaken-identity plot is pleasant enough, even if there’s too much emphatic dithering from the supporting players toward the end.
  95. Deliverance
    Dickey taps into that stark mortal terror of abandoning control, where to become a wild man is somehow a form of connection.
  96. Columbus
    The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery.
  98. Battleship Potemkin
    A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Consuming Spirits
    Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time.
  100. Only Angels Have Wings
    The other reason why Hawks's film can't be approached as a pure sociological interrogation is that it's, quite visibly, a Hollywood production with certain inescapable commitments to entertainment convention. This isn't to downgrade the movie, though, as there's a reason why Hawks and other Old Hollywood filmmakers have become so revered.
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