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. The Card Counter
    Paul Schrader’s film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present.
  2. Near Dark
    A romance, a western, and a totem to lost youth in an era ravaged by infection and addiction, it’s a high-water mark in a decade filled with exemplary genre fare. Borrowing from, and surpassing, the exceptional chemistry of Aliens’s tightly knit cast, the melancholic Near Dark is gorgeous even in its savagery, and one of pulp cinema’s greatest achievements.
  3. Babette's Feast
    This impeccably plated set is as savory as the brains sucked out of a quail’s head by Jarl Kulle’s General Löwenhielm.
  4. 5 Broken Cameras
    The documentary provides a birdsong of perseverance in the face of irrational violence, immense historic anger, and grim, seemingly insurmountable realities.
  5. One of Us
    It's incisive in its condemnation of the oppression innate in the social structure of Brooklyn's Hasidic communities.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Chungking Express
    To Wong, love isn't something you can talk about; words are inadequate, empty, inevitably reductive. Love is something you see, sense, feel, and Chungking Express is one of Wong's purest evocations of its excitement and heartbreak.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Between
    In Between is most affecting when its characters are at their least guarded, but as Nour, Salma, and Laila are hurt by those closest to them, Hamoud's film pulls back toward more formulaic expressions of conflict.
  8. The Summit of the Gods
    While the film intermittently stuns in revealing Everest’s topographical mystique, its expedition into what makes climbers tick struggles to get off the ground.
  9. Oceans Are the Real Continents
    With the film, Tommaso Santambrogio puts neorealism in the service of dream.
  10. Wings
    Seen today, Wings impresses mostly with its enormous scale—its appearance of having been made with obscene amounts of money.
  11. The Chronology of Water
    The beauty of Kristen Stewart’s focus is how she excavates the profound from the mundane.
  12. I, Daniel Blake
    It's pock-marked by the conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures that have marred much of Ken Loach's recent output.
  13. Alice in the Cities
    What makes Alice in the Cities so noteworthy is the tender, lifelike rapport cultivated between Vogler and Rottländer.
  14. The Dark Knight Rises
    Christopher Nolan's capper of his Batman trilogy is a summer blockbuster of grand inclinations in both form and content.
  15. The Lost City of Z
    The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Miroirs No. 3
    Christian Petzold has crafted yet another sneakily trenchant commentary on How We Live Now.
  17. Avengers: Endgame
    Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.
  18. Memories Look at Me
    Worry and sadness are palpable, but so is wry humor and irony as Song ponders age and mortality with a sensitive eye for emotions and a strong sense of composition.
  19. Donbass
    The film’s collisions between the grave and the comic are crucial to its vision of a society cracking under the weight of its own inconsistencies.
  20. The Guard
    The Guard is John Michael McDonagh's caustically funny riff on cop and crime films.
  21. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    The Ballad of Wallis Island plays both its drama and comedy in decidedly minor keys, straining neither for grand emotional revelations nor big laughs.
  22. Blue Ruin
    By reducing its principals to stock figures in an extended chess game, it ends up providing steady, neatly staged thrills, but little else of substance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The People's Joker
    Throughout The People’s Joker, Drew lampoons comedy institutions as freely as she does superhero hegemony, in effect mounting an impassioned argument for the vitality of art made at the margins regardless of classification.
  24. Pavilion
    George Washington this isn't, but there's enough heft here that the comparison can be tastefully made.
  25. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    The film offers a joyous throwback to the optimistic feeling of the early internet creator era.
  26. Hooligan Sparrow
    The Nanfu Wang film's noble aims are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    On Dangerous Ground
    The urban harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all film noir. Despite the violence and the steady intensity, a remarkably pure film.
  28. Ex Machina
    In the end, more than just the machine remains an enigma.
  29. Dragnet Girl
    Dragnet Girl features an array of seemingly debased molls and violent loners who blow off steam with punching bags in between petty wrongdoings, but it never outright vilifies any of them.
  30. Saloum
    With expert visual precision, the film flows into each new, wild narrative wrinkle as if it were the most logical thing in the world.
  31. The Tribe
    The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Sisters Brothers
    The Sisters Brothers proffers a sort of Edenic vision, comedic but tinged with sadness, of a latter-day El Dorado that’s worth basking in, if only as a buffer against the inevitability of its fall.
  33. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Documentarian and subject, past and present blur together like bleeding watercolors in Raymond De Felitta's gripping memoir.
  34. Blue Moon
    Blue Moon, like Lorenz Hart in his day, trusts that audiences want to engage with subjects that matter through deliberate dialogue.
  35. Zootopia
    The film goes deeper in its allegorizing, tapping into the volatile nature of identity politics.
  36. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    There’s considerable emotional truth on display throughout Benjamin Ree’s documentary.
    • 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.
  38. I'm Your Man
    The film’s disarming romcom sensibilities are an unlikely yet fitting vehicle for timely ruminations on AI.
  39. The Velvet Queen
    Long stretches of the film are simply mesmerizing, but both Sylvain Tesson’s written compositions and the conversation between him and Vincent Munier often lapse into clichés about the distractions and decadence of modern society.
  40. The Eight Mountains
    The film is a meditative, slow crescendo of wounded feelings and quiet epiphanies.
  41. A Love Song
    The film relies on wide shots of distant mountains to stand in for a fruitful interrogation of what it means to occupy the open terrain of the U.S.
  42. Non-Fiction
    Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.
  43. Miracle in Milan
    This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.
  44. Shadowman
    This is a gruesome art-world fairy tale unafraid to face the bitter details of its hero's tumultuous life.
  45. Much Ado About Nothing
    The film is nothing without the physicality of the performers, as Joss Whedon's script handles the transition of Shakespeare's language to modern day indifferently.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Scum
    One of director Alan Clarke’s most uncompromising docudramas.
  47. The Breadwinner
    Cross-dressing in the story is merely a tool for survival, but such border-crossing is inevitably rife with unintended consequences beyond narrative ones.
  48. Endless Poetry
    Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.
  49. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    In directly requesting the audience's trust, Travis Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer.
  50. Beach Rats
    Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.
  51. The Charmer
    Director and co-writer Milad Alami's film feels like several fused-together trial drafts of the same narrative.
  52. Tracks
    The feminist bent of Robyn's quest nicely shadows the film without ever being stated aloud.
  53. We're All Going to the World's Fair
    Throughout, Jane Schoenbrun reveals themself to be adroitly plugged into both the current technological and sociological landscape.
  54. Tempestad
    This is a heartfelt essay film that digs into several instances of trauma occasioned by Mexico's drug war.
  55. Frankenstein
    Guillermo del Toro reassembles a multitude of fragments, both lifted from the text and drawn from his own life, into a bloody and beautiful organ of empathy that will assuredly live on.
  56. Sorry to Bother You
    For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.
  57. All That Heaven Allows
    The frothy May-September (well, closer to June-July) romance All That Heaven Allows is the fountain from which directors as disparate as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Todd Haynes, and John Waters have all drunk, marking it as the most influential of the 20-plus films Sirk directed during the 1950s.
  58. 1917
    The most thrilling and haunting details here are actively undermined by the chief technical gimmick of the film.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    A Simple Life
    A Simple Life may have one of the most accurate titles in all of cinema, as the film has a bracingly casual sense of day-to-day working-class life that recalls the films of Jean Renoir or, more recently, Olivier Assayas.
  60. Kedi
    Ceyda Torun’s Kedi is an open, tender-hearted meditation on the relationship between felines and humans.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Love Exposure
    Japanese poet and cult filmmaker Shion Sono defines himself as an anti-establishment artist partly out of cynicism and partly thanks to his romantic concept of libertarianism.
  62. Limbo
    The cinematography solidifies the film’s status as a noir grappling with corruption and probing moral grey areas, while at the same time echoing visually the stark divisions between white and Indigenous people in Australian society.
  63. Hitler's Hollywood
    Rüdiger Suchsland’s film is a master class in the relationship between image production and ideology writ large.
  64. Gaslight
    Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.
  65. The Substance
    The humanity of Demi Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Coralie Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat.
  66. Paradise: Hope
    The third and final film in Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise" trilogy navigates a narrow space between tenderness and cruelty.
  67. Logan Lucky
    Logan Lucky is both a Robin Hood fantasy and a uniquely Soderberghian lark, an ensemble comedy that’s simultaneously effervescent and cerebral.
  68. James and the Giant Peach
    Though certainly not a travesty of any sort, James and the Giant Peach does strike me as the weakest thus far of Dahl’s to-screen adaptations and this mostly has to do with the problems Selick encounters with mixing the world of imagination with the real world.
  69. The Starling Girl
    The film is an impressively complicated and compassionate drama about shame and desire.
  70. High Life
    The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian.
  71. Nosferatu
    Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.
  72. The Blue Trail
    An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.
  73. A Quiet Passion
    A Quiet Passion's accomplishment is in fleshing out the stark context behind Emily Dickinson's ethereal words.
  74. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    Tracy Droz Tragos's documentary examines its titular subject with a compassionate eye for regional detail.
  75. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    The film is affectingly poignant in its frequently uncomfortable presentation of Shane MacGowan’s physical ruination.
  76. Meru
    Its expositional crutch proves most inadequate when the team ascends the final pitch to the top after years of preparation in no more than a minute of screen time.
  77. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.
  78. Clemency
    Chinonye Chukwu’s film is a morality play with a true sense of contradiction and melancholia.
  79. Command and Control
    Robert Kenner's stylistic choices amplify the film's fetishistic fascination with the nuclear weaponry itself.
  80. Fancy Dance
    Erica Tremblay’s granular attention to place makes sure that you take note of the root causes of the defeat felt by the Native characters.
  81. Island of the Hungry Ghosts
    The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.
  82. Till
    Because of Chinonye Chukwu’s willingness to let small-scale, ancillary scenes play out unhurried and at length, Till taps into to a deeper well of emotions than most biopics.
  83. Magnificent Obsession
    Magnificent Obsession was a decisive turning point for Douglas Sirk, kicking off a beloved string of loopy ’50s melodramatic masterpieces.
  84. Above and Below
    The documentary lingers on silences and reveals its subjects only through moments of quotidian behavior.
  85. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Abuse of Weakness
    Breillat's scripting of Maud as fatally distant from her family, willfully independent, but more believably abandoned, is haunting.
  87. Obsession
    Obsession’s big set-piece sequences are as chilling in their effect as they are confident in their execution.
  88. Christmas, Again
    Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.
  89. Have a Nice Day
    The film's pale-hued, Flash-like animation is abundant in detailed backgrounds that make the characters stand out like placards, allowing for Jian's critique of modern China to land with maximum force.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Zero Days
    Director Alex Gibney does this vital material a disservice, giving it an air of deflated pomposity.
  91. Nope
    The film’s fantastical meta-commentaries don’t completely cohere but have a winning go-for-it audaciousness.
  92. Grandma, a Thousand Times
    Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  93. The Misfits
    A perplexing misfire more than a complete dud, The Misfits‘s true legacy remains in the personal histories of those involved with the production rather than in the far more exceptional careers of the artists who brought it to its dull fruition.
  94. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    Morgan Neville understands Orson Welles's art to pivot on an ongoing quest to bring about self-destruction so as to contrive to transcend it.
  95. Finding Dory
    Finding Dory follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.
  96. A Clockwork Orange
    If you watch Clockwork Orange and see that this is the game Kubrick is playing with us, giving us an avenue into understanding a corrosion of society, the film may be appreciated as his finest masterwork in a career full of them. Certainly, it’s his most human film, right next to Lolita in its refusal to judge its central character’s sickness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    China Heavyweight
    Although we never really get to know He or Miao, despite following them around vérité-style, director Yung Chang expertly captures the rays of Western culture bouncing off them.
  98. Violet
    Devos's impressive debut bores into the mourning process and its piquant combination of emotional numbness and sensory vulnerability, rigorously avoiding finding an easy way out of this quagmire.
  99. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Director David Gelb details, among other things, the painstaking process that goes into creating mouthwatering pieces of sushi.
  100. Longlegs
    This is a sturdily constructed horror film with a foundation sneakily built on shifting sands.
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