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. Perfect Days
    The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.
  2. Four Daughters
    A fascinating metacommentary courses beneath the film’s emotional storytelling surface.
  3. 20,000 Species of Bees
    The film blooms in moments where, instead of literally addressing Coco's gender trouble, we’re simply allowed to inhabit it.
  4. Passages
    While there’s much acute pain in this compact but resonant drama, it can also be funny in a way that smacks of self-deprecation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Queen of Versailles
    Lauren Greenfield's film evolves from an ode to entitled obliviousness to a more evenhanded character study, tracing the fault lines that develop within the Siegel family.
  6. Theeb
    Theeb insists on the importance of preserving cultural difference against the totalizing vision of racial and religious hegemony.
  7. Incendies
    An enormously effective piece of filmmaking, Incdendies unfolds as a series of eye-opening disclosures which Villeneuve plays as much for (admittedly enthralling) sensation as for any kind of wider-ranging inquiry, a questionable approach given the thorny nature of the material.
  8. Trophy
    It goes a long way toward complicating our moral assumptions about trophy hunting, as well as a host of other wildlife issues, including conservation, poaching, rhino farms, and the proper balance between man and nature.
  9. Incredibles 2
    Everything in Incredibles 2 is inexorably driven toward a big final blowout. That sequence is suitably grand and eye-popping, but haven’t we seen all of this before?
  10. Gleason
    It has an irritating habit of depending on our natural reactions, letting the subject matter do the heavy lifting.
  11. Casino Royale
    Casino Royale is one of the good ones and not just for the way it wittily recontextualizes several series touchstones.
  12. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
    Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary is a spry and inventive account of extraordinary transcendence.
  13. Xala
    Widely regarded as Ousmane Sembène’s finest achievement, Xala is a cutting morality tale that equally blames the corruption of Senegal’s sociopolitical environment on Euro-centricity and African auto-destruction.
  14. Concerning Violence
    Here is a film that isn't afraid to risk didacticism in order to put across its vision of the debilitating physical and psychological effects of colonialism.
  15. Cane River
    The film’s awkwardness is expressive of the pain and confusion of wrestling with truths that shake one’s conception of identity.
  16. The Citizen
    It adheres too rigidly to news-cycle replications of barbaric governmental acts, and without putting them into greater perspective.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    3:10 to Yuma
    The offhand wryness of Elmore Leonard’s original story is nicely captured in Halsted Welles’s adaptation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Strange Little Cat
    As pleasant and effortless as Ramon Zürcher makes his formal persnicketiness and Akermanian aesthetic rigor seem, his film feels lightweight.
  19. Drowning Dry
    Drowning Dry offers something akin to a cinematic concussion as it begins warping the experience of time.
  20. Ad Astra
    In a future where the plagues of civilization have only evolved into new shapes and sizes, it asks, in a roundabout way, if there’s anything worthier of exploration than our own relationships.
  21. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Hong Sang-soo simultaneously positions filmmaking as the ultimate act of atonement and evasion, eviscerating himself so that he may live to stage several more films about the futility of getting hammered and worshipping and bedding gorgeous young women.
  22. Love & Mercy
    Bill Pohlad seems never to have met a metaphor he couldn't bludgeon into its most rudimentary and literal interpretation.
  23. Story of My Death
    True to its title, the film approaches death as both narrative endpoint and formal focus, its initial vivacious mischief giving way to a Manichean fable about the waning of the light.
  24. Chess Story
    Philipp Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
    Across the film, Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers an intimately observed portrait of Rico and the Bronx’s Dominican community, folding warmth into the very real pressures that define daily life.
  26. Natchez
    With so many engaging voices on offer, Suzannah Herbert wisely chooses to let the locals tell the story rather than providing any explicit narration of her own.
  27. American Honey
    This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are both difficult to deny and to prove exist precisely as depicted.
  28. You Hurt My Feelings
    The film deals forthrightly with the question of purpose and whether or not it can be found in a career.
  29. Monrovia, Indiana
    As always with Frederick Wiseman, it’s the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.
  30. Peter and the Farm
    Peter and the Farm is a warts-and-all portrait that asserts its subject's sense of purpose even as it seems to slip out of his grasp.
  31. Mystery Train
    Mystery Train is a singularly enthusiastic American anthem that trenchantly interprets the cult of audiophilia as filthy gas stoves roasting marshmallows, raspy radio DJs hawking fried calamari, and ill-equipped racial armies ignorantly clashing by night.
  32. A Hidden Life
    Terrence Malick’s film means to seek out souls caught in the tide of history, but which move against its current.
  33. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    Noah Baumbach has made a cunning and frequently hilarious film about exhuming the past and finding no diamond in the rough.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Arrebato (1979)
    Arrebato is an arresting feat of self-aware filmmaking, lashing together experimental tendencies with the tropes and trappings of genre cinema.
  35. I Wish
    I Wish has a tough time balancing the heartfelt with the saccharine and too often feels slight.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What Richard Did
    The film's structure as a character study helps to subtly underscore the flawed justifications of a privileged kid's thought patterns and unchallenged value system.
  37. End of the Century
    Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.
  38. Lady Snowblood
    A rape-revenge narrative so streamlined that even the gimmick of its achronological editing never muddies the progression of Yuki’s journey.
  39. Housekeeping for Beginners
    In spite of the too-muchness of their performances, the actors wrestle for expressiveness and subtlety against the script’s more obvious and schematic telegraphing of not-quite-nuclear discontent and, ultimately, reconciliation.
  40. Iris
    Albert Maysles's portrait of Iris Apfel gradually emerges with cathartic clarity without compromising her inherent mystery.
  41. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    It exists less as a meaningful extension of its world than as a fan-service deployment device.
  42. Last Men in Aleppo
    Feras Fayyad's film is broadly concerned with portraying the titular Syrian city as a community of neighbors and colleagues.
  43. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    The film doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer as it reminds us of our culpability as spectators.
  44. Private Property
    Private Property abounds in inventive low-budget filmmaking while stress-testing a pulpy, dime-store premise.
  45. Union
    The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.
  46. White God
    It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery.
  47. Freaks
    Today, hardcore fans have a way of trivializing the film’s moral significance, some calling it a mere “masterpiece of shock cinema.” This is to seriously underplay the film’s blistering humanity and the audacious aesthetic and philosophical lengths to which Browning goes to challenge the way we define beauty and abnormality.
  48. The Public Enemy
    There’s little denying the power of Cagney’s presence, from the first moment he’s on screen, he radiates such a brash Fenian cockiness you can imagine kids at the time flocking out of the theater and cocking their caps just like him. It’s a performance so perfect in its intensity that any other quibbles about the film ultimately recede into insignificance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Mill and the Cross
    Every bit as visceral an experience as Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and with a lead actor whose face radiates the same eternal quality as that of the late Klaus Kinski, The Mill and The Cross also feels a lot like live theater.
  50. Lean on Pete
    As sharply as it delineates an America of spotty, informal economies, the film avoids articulating most of the people who live and work in these spaces.
  51. Claire's Camera
    Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.
  52. Last and First Men
    The push and pull between gradual buildup and apocalyptic rupture allows the film to infiltrate the mind and recalibrate our sensitivity to time.
  53. Bergman Island
    The film never sacrifices its ambiguity as it brings various threads about ghosts, relationships, art, and gender to a head.
  54. Barbie
    The film is at once a journey of self-actualization and a testament to female solidarity.
  55. We the Animals
    In We the Animals, director Jeremiah Zagar sustains a tone of wounded nostalgia, fashioning a formalism that appears to exist simultaneously in the past and present.
  56. Wild Rose
    Tom Harper’s film empathetically probes the growing pains of self-improvement.
  57. Strange Darling
    Strange Darling is a cunningly devised thriller that wields our assumptions against us like a sharp implement, delighting in making us squirm.
  58. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    Like few modern films, Alfredo Garcia seems to not only be a product of a director’s singular vision, but a virtual window into one man’s fractured, tortured soul.
  59. Boy and the World
    One wonders how receptive young audiences should be to a film that puts its storytelling secondary to its message-making.
    • 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.
  61. The Eternal Daughter
    The film is honest and poignant in its kaleidoscopic refractions of the frustration inherent in a process that’s only just beginning.
  62. The Settlers
    The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.
  63. The Beast
    Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.
  64. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.
  65. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    Radha’s remaking of herself contains an uplifting, unpretentious truth about aging: It’s never too late to make a new start.
  66. Take Out
    Economic anxiety is rarely spoken about in the film, but the life-and-death importance of dollars and cents is felt in every frame.
  67. Compartment No. 6
    Juho Kuosmanen’s film interestingly thrives off of an ironic juxtaposition of character and environment.
  68. Lucky
    John Carroll Lynch's Lucky is an impeccably acted yet sentimental film that’s bashful about said sentimentality.
  69. Sleep
    Jason Yu’s film may not reach its full potential, but it offers a devious commentary on the all-too-human desire for easy explanations.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Irma Vep
    The post-modern compulsions on display here may bring movies together, but they also keep people apart. Irma Vep is a picture of missed connections and tenuous relationships, most touchingly in the scenes between Cheung and Zoe (Nathalie Richard), her smitten costume designer.
  71. Anne at 13,000 ft
    The film intimately immerses us in the psyche of a woman for whom each day is a minefield of uncomfortable interactions.
  72. Ham on Rye
    The film’s purposeful archness challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.
  73. Call Me Kuchu
    The film provides welcome context for the semi-hysteria that recently took over the U.S. media in regard to Uganda's "Kill the Gays" bill.
  74. Berberian Sound Studio
    On the surface, Peter Strickland's film is an amusing black comedy that parodies the horror movie's continual status as the cultural black sheep of the cinematic landscape, but the filmmaker is most prominently concerned with painting a sonic portrait of alienation.
  75. Mad God
    Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare.
  76. Il Futuro
    A counterproductively "literary" film with no satisfying payoffs, Rutger Hauer's blind recluse notwithstanding.
  77. David Crosby: Remember My Name
    The film captures a man haunted by his past mistakes and nearly certain that he doesn’t have the time left to begin making up for them.
  78. Aquarela
    At heart, Victor Kossakovsky's Aquarela is a war film: a cacophonous survey of the global battle between man and water.
  79. The Pearl Button
    Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.
  80. The Force
    Though initially compelling, Peter Nick's documentary is fundamentally without a clear perspective on its subject.
  81. Brief History of a Family
    The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions that can cast a pall over family life.
  82. Other People's Children
    The film’s most authentic moments are those that leave its main character breathless, cutting her plans for making up for lost time short.
  83. I Am Not a Witch
    It finds that rare nexus of the comic and the tragic, underlining the absurdity of a terrible situation without demeaning those who have been harmed by it.
  84. Deliverance
    Dickey taps into that stark mortal terror of abandoning control, where to become a wild man is somehow a form of connection.
  85. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The pleasure in watching the film becomes a linguistic one as Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart masterfully sharpen their words and hurl them at each other like projectiles out of a blowpipe.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Still Small Voice
    The film does a fine job of holding a mirror to the experience of therapeutic practice.
  87. Demon
    Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.
  88. Gasoline Rainbow
    The film is rich in compositions that seem to cut to the essence of the characters’ yearnings.
  89. The Ice Tower
    The Ice Tower is, ultimately, an aesthetic and nostalgic exercise.
  90. Light From Light
    Only in focusing so thoroughly on the normal does Paul Harrill’s film stumble upon the paranormal.
  91. Too Late to Die Young
    The experience of watching Dominga Sotomayor’s film is not unlike entering a stranger’s dream without an anchor.
  92. The Nature of Love
    The Nature of Love engages with the stylings and bubbly tonality of the classic rom-com in ironic fashion, along the way exploring complex aspects of human behavior.
  93. Goodbye First Love
    A poignant sense of time's unyielding forward progress and a mood of deep adolescent sorrow aren't enough to overshadow the insufferable blankness of Goodbye First Love's navel-gazing protagonists.
  94. The Endless
    Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead veer away from the deeper, even meta-cinematic, implications of their plotting.
  95. Indivisible
    Edoardo de Angelis's coming-of-age portrait is poignant when fixated on the intricacies of a complicated sisterhood.
  96. Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass achieves a borderline abstract splendor that's furthered by the directors' avoidance of delving deeply into its human subjects, whose backstories and general circumstances are only alluded to through fly-on-wall scraps.
  97. The Old Man & the Gun
    David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Last of the Unjust
    Claude Lanzmann's film doesn't so much strive to elucidate the Shoah as to draw us into its infinite moral complexities.
  99. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind isn't a novelty item, but a work of anguished art that's worthy of its creator.
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