Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. Marriage Story
    Throughout, the subtle glimpses of a couple’s lingering affection for one another complicate the bitterness of their separation.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    An electrifying achievement, drawing its high-voltage forward momentum from the collision of semi-documentary procedural, with its based-on-real-events verisimilitude, and downbeat rogue-cop revisionism.
  3. La La Land
    Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.
  4. Petite Maman
    The film evinces Céline Sciamma’s profound knack for visual economy, communicating much with silent looks and structured absences.
  5. Lady Bird
    A uniquely American comedy, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is testy, humane, and firmly rooted in its time and place.
  6. All We Imagine as Light
    Writer-director Payal Kapadia has created an exceptional document of a city and its people.
  7. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    American Utopia feels as much like a balm as it is a surprisingly direct call to political action and social betterment.
  8. Shoplifters
    In Shoplifters, Kore-eda dramatizes the insidious and relativistic ordinariness of poverty.
  9. Shoah: Four Sisters
    By uniting these four interviews in particular, Claude Lanzmann emphasizes the impossibility of moral clarity in the unthinkable circumstances into which Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe threw its Jewish population.
  10. 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.
  11. Toni Erdmann
    By its end, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.
  12. No Other Land
    With exceptional lucidity, No Other Land reminds us of the human stakes of Israel’s resettlement of the West Bank, and that fighting for justice starts from the ground up.
  13. Uncut Gems
    In the film, a man's individual tragedy illuminates the emptiness of the systems that define him.
  14. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    It could be the most authentic representation of wilderness life ever put on screen.
  15. Inside Llewyn Davis
    As played by an eloquently beleaguered Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis is arguably the most vivid and complex character the Coens have dreamed up since Marge Gunderson.
  16. The Best Years of Our Lives
    If The Best Years of Our Lives emerges as a more contemporary-seeing film than almost anything else to which its ingredients could compare, it’s because of how it wrestles with the burden of patriotism. The nation’s problems are right there in plain sight, just as clear as cinematographer Gregg Toland’s typically precise deep-focus shots.
  17. Band of Outsiders
    More than lifting from and reconfiguring the artifacts of auteurist Hollywood, Band of Outsiders sees Godard parsing out his feelings for Karina, then his wife (they divorced soon after the film was completed), and meditating on the mercurial nature of his own preoccupations.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Stagecoach
    If this is the Old West of our dreams, it’s one that exists in an outsider’s limbo, away from society’s rules, alternating between the breathtaking breadth of the American landscape and the Germanically shadowy lighting of Ford’s claustrophobic interiors.
  19. 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.
  20. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Few other British films from that period seem to mythologize the pre-war period of Churchill's youth and early career quite as potently as Colonel Blimp.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Two Seasons, Two Strangers
    In beautifully quiet ways, Two Seasons, Two Strangers captures its characters in the realm of the ineffable, making the mundane utterly sublime.
  22. TÁR
    The film is consistently compelling visually and aurally, but neither Todd Field nor Cate Blanchett seem quite decided on whether Tár’s comeuppance is a grand tragedy or a cosmic joke.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tristana (re-release)
    There are more than a few striking images and intriguing ideas to be extracted from Tristana. [10 Oct. 2012]
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Last Picture Show
    Delineates the quiet, desperate lives of the citizens of Anarene, Texas over the course of one year in the early 1950s.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
    • 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.
  28. No Bears
    No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.
  29. 8½
    8½ works best as a self-deprecating comedy, a fact revealed most forcefully in the folly of film production on display.
  30. 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.
  31. Spotlight
    By modeling its structure so closely after "All the President's Men," Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition.
  32. The Band Wagon
    Only musical theater people will plug into this love-fest, breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. That’s entertainment?
  33. Late Spring (1949)
    Few films have expressed, with as much force and lyricism as Ozu’s Late Spring, the various emotions (melancholy, bittersweet joy, impassioned regret, taciturn resignation) associated with the ongoing, perpetual dissolution of “the world as we know it.”
  34. Ikiru
    Ikiru wows for its complicated interrogation (and innovation) of subjective, cinematic experiences of time and memory, but lulls in its commemoration of a wealthy, privileged man who finally decides to care after it’s absolutely confirmed he has no time left to live.
  35. The Wizard of Oz
    A true amalgam of creative forces individually pooling their studio-contract talents like a hive of bees.
  36. Memoria
    Again in a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets.
  37. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    This is the most disturbing spin on the invasion premise, because it still permits the simple, classical predator/parasite interpretation, but, at the same time, makes the infiltration total, because the snatchers don’t just take your body, your memories, your brains—they take you. All of you.
  38. Close-Up
    Call it what you will (documentary, mockumentary, self-fulfilling prophecy), Close-Up is still the definitive film-on-film commentary.
  39. Chinatown
    The exhaustive, labyrinthine narrative is built up like a fortress around this film’s bitter heart.
  40. Here
    Bas Devos’s trademark placidity and restraint constitutes a challenge to narrative convention.
  41. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
    This hybridized essay film embodies the complications and contradictions inherent within Black history—complete with all its erasures and variances.
  42. The Florida Project
    Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.
  43. Timbuktu
    The film's criticism isn't primarily rooted in satire, but rather in fury and condemnation for those who seek to be gods while shamefully feigning to follow and praise one god.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Frenzy
    With a very strong cast and sharp dialogue by Anthony Shaffer, Frenzy is easily the strongest of the master’s final works.
  45. Days
    Reciprocity might be impossible in a world rigged against queerness, Tsai seems to say, which doesn’t mean that certain things can't still be shared.
  46. Almayer's Folly
    Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.
  47. Cool Hand Luke
    Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout, bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat, but the film’s efforts to sentimentally humanize him by psychological revelation are clumsy.
  48. The Act of Killing
    In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.
  49. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film is one of the supreme cinematic examinations of the body’s magnificent malleability.
  50. 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Driven by the potency of its social intentions, the film is so authentically felt that it becomes hyper-real, a nightmarish disquisition about how entire systems are rigged against women that would feel academic if it didn’t play out against earnest performances of tender teenage emotions.
  52. Annie Hall
    Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is made of such durable stuff that it’s liked even by many of the filmmaker’s detractors, and yet it had such a troubled production that it’s a miracle it exists at all.
  53. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    By de-emphasizing politics in favor of humanitarianism, Danielle Gardner's work also suggests how Americans might yet unify even as the world around them threatens to tear itself apart.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Zone of Interest
    The soundtrack of the Hösses’ daily lives is a reminder of the nightmare taking place just beyond the wall outside their home, and these sounds, relentless in their sense of evocativeness, give an extra layer of the uncanny to Höss’s already unsettling character.
  55. 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.
  56. Leviathan
    Andrey Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus.
  57. The Souvenir
    Its stylistic fluctuations are a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Man Vanishes (1967)
    The earthiest of Japanese New Wave directors, Shohei Imamura goes fascinatingly meta in this 1967 hybrid of investigative tract and ruminative experiment.
  59. The Look of Silence
    If The Look of Silence still remains a gripping, vital, consequential documentary, it's in spite of its approach rather than because of it.
  60. Tower
    Broadly, filmmaker Keith Maitland's treatment of the UT Tower shooting is both taut and humane.
  61. The Secret Agent
    More broadly appealing than Kleber Mendonça Filho’s past films, The Secret Agent is still unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Burning
    With Burning, Lee Chang-dong extraordinarily obliterates the bifurcation between life and representation, the thing in itself and the metaphor.
  63. Drive My Car
    At its most accomplished, the film unfolds with a voluptuous slowness and a sense that narrative endpoints are irrelevant.
  64. It Was Just an Accident
    The film is astutely aware of the physical and psychological scars that that result from living in a state of tyranny.
  65. A Summer's Tale
    A Summer's Tale's linear structure and sense of observation is simple yet inspired.
  66. Saint Omer
    If courtroom dramas are usually about taking a stand, Saint Omer shows us that the most impactful truths often go unspoken.
  67. Time
    It reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time.
  68. Gavagai
    Rob Tregenza's film is rooted in the communion as well as the sensorial challenges of savoring art.
  69. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    Patrick Wang's particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles.
  70. The Killing
    One of the great devils of 1950s American cinema.
  71. Swing Time
    Swing Time has some of Astaire and Rogers’s mightiest set pieces, which are intertwined to reflect their characters’ evolving relationship.
  72. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    Under Sora Neo’s direction, each number becomes a mini-study of Sakamoto and the grand piano he plays on.
  73. Son of Saul
    The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Love Affair
    Unlike many romantic comedies of the current age, life is decidedly not what you make of it in McCarey’s films; instead, it comes at you hard and cruel, and if you’re lucky you’ll find the right person with whom to weather the storm.
  75. 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Little Women
    Individual scenes are set to the rhythm of the young women’s conversations, which at times approach Gilmore Girls-level warp speed.
  77. 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The African Queen
    Bogart slyly draws upon his past performances here—men of weary-eyed cynicism and faded idealism—to give Charlie’s rudderless existence an extra-textual charge.
  79. Ghost Tropic
    Bas Devos’s film is a street-lit trek through the eerily empty avenues and byways of a city at sleep.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    In Holy Grail, they put their talents to work on a larger scale, mixing wonderful satires on the Medieval legend and lifestyle with tremendous comic timing and blatant dirty jokes.
  81. Flee
    The film effectively immerses us in the wrenching details of Amin’s story, but it keeps us just a bit too far removed from the man himself.
  82. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Anti-war statements of the cinema in the subsequent 80 years have occasionally surpassed Lewis Milestone’s technically and artistically groundbreaking film, but few can match it for relentless despair or elemental fury—both on and off the battlefield.
  83. 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    It's in his generous, objective use of long shots and spare but startling close-ups that we see once again the influence of Robert Altman in Yang's aesthetic and the struggle of the Taiwanese people to accept their history. In essence, Yang uses his aesthetic to bring into the light that which is dark.
  85. Tótem
    Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using its main character as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lady Killer (Gueule d’Amour)
    Exquisite and disturbing, Gueule d’Amour is still one of the screen’s least seen masterpieces.
  87. Stories We Tell
    Sarah Polley is much more interested in the malleability of memory and the consequential refractions felt throughout her kin rather than telling a linear narrative.
  88. Nickel Boys
    RaMell Ross’s remarkable film finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Colson Whitehead’s prose.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Boy and the Heron
    The true tragedy of The Boy and the Heron seems not to be that the blemishes of its fantasy mirror those of its reality, but that any one person should think themselves capable of sanitizing either.
  90. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.
  91. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Jafar Panahi spotlights the act of filmmaking as an act of resistance as well as a possible source of propaganda and manipulation.
  92. Ida
    Pawel Pawlikowski shows great empathy toward the idea of illusions as a way of attaining emotional stability in even the most brutal terrain.
  93. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.
  94. Hit the Road
    For too much of its running time, Panah Panahi’s film is untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose.
  95. An Autumn Afternoon
    The progression of Ozu’s style seems to parallel that of Jacques Tati, who moved from the mutable likes of M. Hulot’s Holiday into the glass-cut inflexibility of Playtime.
  96. Anora
    The film’s initial pull lies in the way that Sean Baker intoxicatingly keys his aesthetic to the fervor of a budding romance that we clearly know won’t end well.
  97. The Favourite
    The Favourite, notably the first of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films to be written by others, is more narratively coherent and conventional than The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara’s florid screenplay still affords the Greek Weird Wave auteur ample opportunity to assert his idiosyncratic worldview.
  98. Over the Limit
    The film is composed of minutely observed moments that Marta Prus has assembled into an affecting narrative.
  99. Ghost World
    Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.
  100. The Right Stuff
    The titular “stuff” is shown to be a combination of courage, determination, and recklessness, but, as Kaufman’s stirring epic reminds us, an equally important motivation for greatness is the fear of being merely second best.
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