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. The Assistant
    With The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate.
  2. 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.
  3. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    This is a summer blockbuster contingent on grand bargains, tactical retreats, and a ferocious, inevitable shock-and-awe campaign.
  4. The Untouchables
    Steeped in De Palma's glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk.
  5. Kokomo City
    The film’s most significant accomplishment is the mood it crafts with its cool black-and-white images, fast-paced editing, unorthodox camera angles, handheld camera, and overall jazzy atmosphere.
  6. Ghost Elephants
    Ghost Elephants shows that Werner Herzog is fiercely determined to explore new frontiers while they still exist and capture the poetic phenomena of nature and the unshakeable dreams it continues to instill in mankind.
  7. Hustlers
    The film is remarkable for capturing a brewing conflict between women while also celebrating their connection.
  8. Let the Sunshine In
    Claire Denis finds the inexorable beauty (and sadness) in that most corrosive and fugacious of feelings.
  9. Life of Pi
    The second act shifts the film from a lazy and comfy litany of introductions to a riveting fantasia of pure cinema, wherein Lee paints an oft-wordless picture of nature's harshness and grace, the perfect arena for Pi to have a Christ-like coming of age.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Renate Costa's doc gradually simplifies into an elaborate seesaw between general, journalistic scoopery and unabashedly personal confrontation.
  11. Return to Dust
    The film is best in moments when the bond between two outcasts is made corporeal and fully present.
  12. Fences
    Danzel Washington honors the manna of the play's being: the micro of romantic longing, self-loathing, and nostalgia.
  13. Kimi
    The film extend into impactful hyperbole the tensions inherent in the situation of being subjects of and subjects to incessant surveillance.
  14. The Witness
    The film presents Kitty Genovese's identity as an afterthought, turning her living days and nights into incidental details.
  15. One Second
    One Second is as much a tribute to the struggles of a man whose life has stolen from him as it is to a bygone way of looking at movies.
  16. Twinless
    The film is a bizarrely moving and darkly comic story about feeling like you’ve lost something you never had.
  17. Keep the Lights On
    More than just a relationship drama of striking specificity, this is a naked confession about addiction.
  18. Fill the Void
    The film unfolds in unhurried dramatic terms that come to take on an almost fatalistic force.
  19. Hermia & Helena
    It may be Piñeiro’s most inspired and thrilling work to date, exhaustive in its means of keeping the viewer off balance and yet rich in its emotional implications.
  20. 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. =
  21. Another Round
    Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, like The Hunt, is ultimately a parable about breaking a social contract.
  22. Shiva Baby
    Emma Seligman’s film effectively builds tension from what is a relatively familiar, low-key scenario.
  23. Searching for Sugar Man
    Despite crafting a consistently engaging film, the director doesn't present the full scope of Sixto Rodriguez's life.
  24. Sing Street
    All traces of grit from John Carney's earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.
  25. Brawl in Cell Block 99
    Brawl in Cell Block 99 rarely drags, even when delivering exposition, and the economy of the storytelling is as efficiently brutal as the eventual skull-crackings.
  26. The Law in These Parts
    A film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.
  27. Official Competition
    Official Competition is another film about filmmaking, but it escapes hermeticism by homing in on actors and acting.
  28. 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.
  29. Sand Dollars
    It respects and plumbs the feelings of all three main characters while surfacing the economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender power imbalances in their relationships.
  30. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    Cohen here is ever the model of grace and dignity around his peers, if not exactly entirely at peace with himself.
  31. Priscilla
    Priscilla’s delicate mystique struggles to free itself from an oppressive mood board imposed from without by six decades of history.
  32. The Innocents
    The Innocents adopts a slasher-esque vibe that, however airlessly aestheticized, feels lurid for the sake of being lurid.
  33. Contemporary Color
    The Rosses share David Byrne’s interest in the minutiae of habitats and the comforting enclosure they provide along with the discomfiting constriction of anonymity.
  34. The Painter and the Thief
    Throughout the documentary, Benjamin Ree upsets conventions, offering a moving portrait of two lost souls.
  35. Black Bear
    Shot through with darkly existentialist humor, the film finds Aubrey Plaza throwing a gauntlet to filmmakers who have typecast her in the past.
  36. Our School
    The filmmakers spend vastly more time chronicling bigoted remarks from Romanians about gypsy life than they do actual gypsy life, so a minor crisis of perspective hangs over Our School.
  37. Our Children
    It's occasionally too icily removed, but it compensates through its perpetual concern with understanding its characters and their untenable situations.
  38. i'm thinking of ending things
    The film has a weird, ghostly, even beautiful pull, but it functions mostly on theoretical terms because Charlie Kaufman has thought it to death.
  39. Angels Wear White
    In her understandable fury, Vivian Qu almost valorizes suffering, embracing it as a substantial signifier of identity.
  40. Lurker
    The artist and audience member are coequal—and codependent—in this perceptive drama about a parasocial relationship that enters the realm of reality.
  41. Lady and the Tramp
    Befitting its middle-ish chronological position, it’s not surprising that the serviceably cute but mundane Lady—a turn-of-the-century ditty about two love struck dogs from opposite sides of the gated community—might be the most ignorable, least assertive production of their golden era.
  42. Indignation
    James Schamus's screenplay is rich with culturally specific details that deepen these forking moral predicaments.
  43. The Devil's Backbone
    With The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro pulls an Amenábar by dishing out sophisticated war commentary with bone-chilling dread.
  44. Oki's Movie
    Hong Sang-soo once again corroborates auteurist theory at the same time that he reveals the potential shortcomings of its practice.
  45. Speak No Evil
    Until its contrived conclusion, the film plays as a queasy satire of conditioned interpersonal behavior.
  46. The Queen
    A quaint portrait it’s not, and aside from the conditions of the rat-trap midtown hotel where the competing queens are put up in, it’s hardly fly-on-the-wall either. While it presents its subjects at arm’s length, The Queen consistently recognizes the constraints they face.
  47. Kontinental '25
    Radu Jude’s cinema isn’t exactly absurdist, though it exposes the absurdities of a present reeling from the unresolved injustices of yore.
  48. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
    From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.
  49. Enough Said
    Enough can't be said about how the late James Gandolfini comes so close to saving writer-director Nicole Holofcener's latest articulation of white suburban anxieties.
  50. A Different Man
    The film’s overarching dramatic irony leaves one to ponder the deliberately discomfiting question of whether it’s possible to extricate the experience of disability from the way spectators define its essence.
  51. An Unfinished Film
    If the frames of Lou’s previous work suggested that reality was something that could be unlocked and unfurled, An Unfinished Film’s presentation of reality as it basically was unfortunately gives the filmmaker, and the audience, little to discover.
  52. Les Misérables
    The film serves as both caustic update to Victor Hugo’s monolithic novel and cautionary tale about the future.
  53. Kajillionaire
    The precarity and itinerant lifestyle of the central figures in Kajillionaire can be seen as a logical next step in Miranda July’s filmmaking trajectory.
  54. Long Strange Trip
    The film plays like one of the Grateful Dead's seminal concerts: protracted and digressive, yet intricate in its design.
  55. Styx
    The film is a penetrating an indictment of the bureaucratic obstacles placed in front of refugees.
  56. Sujo
    Befitting the unseen forces that seem to drive the characters, writer-directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero bring a haunted, dreamlike undercurrent to the film similar to sequences from their prior collaboration, Identifying Features.
  57. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
    Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass becomes a film about its own condition of being an outsider to its own time, lost as it is in the aesthetics of another time that it views with a kind of nostalgic disquiet.
  58. Top Gun: Maverick
    The film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Joseph Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.
  59. BlackBerry
    By emphasizing the people in its tech tale, and the comedic possibilities in their mismatch, rather than the gee-whiz factor, Matt Johnson frees BlackBerry from the need to convince its audience how important the invention at its center was.
  60. Tori and Lokita
    The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.
  61. 3 Faces
    Whenever Panahi's architecturally rigorous study of the self, society, and artistic communion threatens to get too self-conscious or loaded, the filmmaker tends to leaven the tension with humor and gentle irreverence.
  62. Oddity
    Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy.
  63. Luzzu
    Alex Camilleri’s most significant departures from his influences take place on the level of content, but, thankfully, they strain the integrity of the neorealist framework just enough to keep Luzzu fresh, if not revolutionary.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Witches
    At the center of Roeg’s stylistic excess is Houston, balancing effortlessly between high camp and horror.
  66. Airplane!
    The punchlines come quick and thick, with little foreplay or consideration for anything other than getting a physical reaction from the audience.
  67. birth/rebirth
    Birth/Rebirth serves as a perverse correction, recalibrating decades of dilution to reemphasize the moral weight and emotional anguish at the heart of Shelley’s novel.
  68. Warfare
    This is a formidable technical showcase and obsessive forensic recreation whose imposed formal limitations become meaning-making ends in and of themselves.
  69. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Jay Bulger's seemingly erratic documentary formally channels Ginger Baker's almost defiant refusal to lead a life that adheres to a linear narrative.
  70. Castle in the Sky
    Miyazaki’s concerns with the fragility and wonder of our less tangible surroundings haunt the picture without overpowering it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Public Speaking
    If you’re a longtime fan of the truly iconoclastic essayist...expecting to learn what makes her tick then Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese’s loving profile of the early bloomer who subsequently spent a decade with “writer’s blockade,” is certain to disappoint.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    In the Fog
    Sergei Loznitsa occasionally writes his ideas too explicitly in the film's dialogue, though he makes up for this by deftly employing some ironic symbolism elsewhere.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The War Room
    The buddy-film dynamic between braniac lead strategist James Carville and telegenic communications director George Stephanopoulos provides The War Room with a compelling through line and emotional cornerstone.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Police Story (1985)
    Like many of the most compelling martial-arts movies, the Police Story films more closely resembles a dance picture than any kind of action blockbuster, with meticulously choreographed fight sequences standing in for fan-baiting musical numbers.
  75. Dìdi
    The film speaks unflinchingly to the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teenhood.
  76. After Yang
    Kogonada’s film doesn’t trust us to recognize the legitimacy of the other’s being without filtering it solely through the lenses of the ruling class.
  77. Argentina, 1985
    For a film about the crimes of a fascist military dictatorship that employed mass torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder as weapons of social control, Argentina, 1985 sure goes down smooth.
  78. Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia
    A unique joie de vivre courses through A Trip to Gibberitia’s every meticulously composed frame.
  79. Gloria Bell
    The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.
  80. Monos
    Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.
  81. Il Buco
    The film meticulously evokes a 1961 speleological expedition, but its search for thematic resonance is frustratingly general.
  82. Blue Jasmine
    One of Woody Allen's strongest and most pointed films in over a decade despite mildly falling victim to his recent propensity for clunky narrative development, cynicism, and stereotypical characterizations.
  83. The Innocents
    Anne Fontaine's film is an allegory for women's condition more generally, in times of war or peace.
  84. The Shadowless Tower
    The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dry Leaf
    Alexandre Koberidze reminds us that not seeing is sometimes a way of seeing the world differently.
  86. It Comes at Night
    The film’s minimalism is rigorous, but its every moment of barebones craftsmanship is accompanied by plodding drama and an unsustainable heap of unanswered questions.
  87. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    The film abounds in honest and at times disarmingly off-the-cuff moments that are borne out of character contrasts.
  88. Rocks in My Pockets
    This inventive animated feature about depression and familial roots suggests NPR's "The Moth" storytelling series by way of Persepolis, mixing mesmerizing memoir monologue with whimsical animation.
  89. Breathe
    Aside from the innate understanding of female friendship dynamics, it's hard to see exactly what else Mélanie Laurent brings to this overly familiar story.
  90. Predator: Killer of Killers
    Killer of Killers only gives us just enough to get by, get invested, and get to the goods.
  91. John Wick: Chapter 4
    In the gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.
  92. Enys Men
    Enys Men might have been called A Blueprint for Revival: an attempt to restore to horror something that Jenkin feels has been lost. If only it didn’t lack the power to truly frighten us, it may have flourished.
  93. Barracuda
    It's anchored by a pair of dynamic, intuitive performances which mine the psychological complexities of an understandably troubled relationship.
  94. The Grief of Others
    This a much leaner film in terms of narrative incident than In the Family, though it paves the way for Patrick Wang to step into new artistic terrain.
  95. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    It’s Morgan Neville’s impression of Bourdain as a time bomb existing in plain sight that allows Roadrunner to be more than a greatest-hits rundown of the man’s life.
  96. Becoming Bulletproof
    The trust that Bulletproof's filmmakers have in their cast and their talent is humanely and succinctly illustrated throughout.
  97. Queens of the Qing Dynasty
    Ashley McKenzie’s film blossoms into a moving story about two people trapped by the institutions that they’re beholden to.
  98. High Flying Bird
    Steven Soderbergh’s film considers modern media as a vehicle for revising white patriarchal capitalism.
  99. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
    Right out of the gate, the filmmakers’ filtering of a James Bond-esque espionage tale through a grindhouse sensibility exists in such a state of emphatic stimulation that each shot feels punctuated with an exclamation point.
  100. The Humans
    Throughout The Humans, Stephen Karam orchestrates the highs and lows of a family reunion with Chekhovian subtlety.
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