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 Heiresses
    Ana Brun’s performance as Chela anchors our attention where Marcelo Martinessi’s understated visuals might otherwise lose it.
  2. The Mustang
    Single-minded and direct in its execution, the film is a hard look at the extremes of masculine guilt and healing.
  3. Two Years at Sea
    The stillness and silence with which we look upon Jake Williams ranges from curious to unnerving to fascinating.
  4. Madam Phung's Last Journey
    With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.
  5. Presenting Princess Shaw
    The peculiar circumstances of the documentary necessitate more transparency than the filmmaker is willing to offer.
  6. A Star Is Born
    William Wellman’s 1937 version of this oft-told tale, of the rising starlet and the plummeting alcoholic has-been she refuses to cast aside, is usually regarded as the second-best of the lot, a few steps behind George Cukor’s 1954 remake, which has the unfair advantage of being one of the unimpeachable masterpieces of American film.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Basket Case
    Henenlotter’s consistent blurring of the line between horror and comedy is one of the more perverse side effects of his warped sensibility, keeping viewers off balance, so that they never know whether the punchline to one of Basket Case’s many gags will be just that, a crude joke, or the sight of someone getting their face ripped to shreds.
  8. La Flor
    The arc of La Flor’s first three episodes, in particular, suggests someone continually working and reworking the film of their dreams, adjusting the tone, the approach, the narrative twists and the emotional intensity on the fly.
  9. Philomena
    A human-interest story that claims spite for human-interest stories, the film has some pretty divisive issues at its core that leave it torn between contrasting approaches.
  10. First Love
    First Love reveals itself to be an elegant and haunting Takashi Miike film in throwaway clothing.
  11. Jauja
    Other films of this ilk use widescreen composition to highlight a terrifying existential void, but these cramped frames tend to produce the nutty energy of cabin fever.
  12. The Immigrant
    In its stripped-down realism and blistering fixation on its main character's grappling with life and mortality, the film is kin to Roberto Rossellini's collaborations with Ingrid Bergman.
  13. Don't Call Me Son
    Writer-director Anna Muylaert writes themes into excellent, controlled first acts that turn capricious by the third.
  14. The Amusement Park
    With The Amusement Park, George Romero holds a cracked (funhouse) mirror up to a callous and ultimately terrified society.
  15. Detroit
    Kathryn Bigelow hyper-realistically, almost dispassionately, covers her ensemble’s actions in the manner of a somber disaster film.
  16. The Edge of Seventeen
    The smartest thing about Kelly Fremon Craig's teen dramedy is its measured take on its protagonist's theatrics.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Brooklyn Castle
    It pays to consider even the small details of society's greatest investment in the future: our future generations.
  18. Logan
    It recognizes that the thinly veiled secret of Wolverine’s loner act is that he’s always been a cog of some kind.
  19. 28 Years Later
    The film’s conception of the future, perceptively, looks back to humankind’s primeval past.
  20. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    The film is enlivened by an acute grasp of the impossibilities that abused Indonesian women face in a society predicated on their continued physical and emotional subjugation to men.
  21. Gerald's Game
    Mike Flanagan is an un-ironic humanist, which is rare in the horror genre. And this admirable quality trips the filmmaker up in the second half of Gerald's Game, which pivots on Jessie learning to stand up to diseased masculinity.
  22. The Wife
    Glenn Close's perennial look of astonishment and resilience commands the action to the point of turning every other screen element into a gratuitous prop.
  23. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    It has the core of a genuine crowd-pleaser, but unfortunately something bigger and more all-consuming keeps getting into its head.
  24. Dheepan
    Jacques Audiard's film struggles to overcome the burden of its over-simplified, moralizing setup.
  25. Promare
    Promare often feels like a maximalist season finale trimmed of any build-up, a climax that’s outstanding to watch yet empty beyond its pure spectacle.
  26. The Disaster Artist
    James Franco's The Disaster Artist perfectly conveys the surreal hell of what the production of Tommy Wiseau's The Room must have been like.
  27. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    It routinely alternating between episodes that contrast exhilaration with exploitation and damnation.
  28. All Light, Everywhere
    Theo Anthony’s film is a playful, enraging, free-associative cine-essay that both expands and eats itself alive as it proceeds.
  29. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    Nightmare’s skill wasn’t that it invented such associations—which had already been thoroughly mined by its ’70s predecessors—but that it refined them in uniquely disturbing ways, drenching itself in an atmosphere of unreality positioned somewhere between waking and slumbering states.
  30. Keep Quiet
    The filmmakers astutely reveal how a culture can eat another alive and somehow live with itself.
  31. Kneecap
    Much of Rich Peppiatt’s film isn’t about respectability, but rather debasement, and sugar-coating Kneecap’s widespread antics isn’t on the menu.
  32. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.
  33. Leaning Into the Wind
    The film has a wandering, lonely purity. We feel as if we've been allowed to fleetingly swim through Andy Goldsworthy's psyche.
  34. My Beautiful Laundrette
    Thatcherism yielded results that are arguably typical of conservative ideology: high-class flourishing at the expense of the lower class proletariat, who’re left underpaid (at best), over-taxed, adrift, and profoundly resentful of their limited opportunities. My Beautiful Laundrette is a moving, tonally elastic study of this environment’s socio-political ground floor.
  35. Brighton 4th
    The film unfolds at a pace that is unhurried yet self-assured, submerged in the rhythms that govern its characters’ lives.
  36. Father Mother Sister Brother
    More than any other Jim Jarmusch film, Father Mother Sister Brother is haunted by mortality and the inevitable passage of time.
  37. Blue Caprice
    The filmmakers are more interested in questioning what brings people to commit senseless and merciless acts than they are preoccupied with the historical record.
  38. Spettacolo
    Though some of Spettacolo's tension is superficial, the stuff of any let’s-put-on-a-show narrative, its latent anxieties are myriad and profoundly resonant.
  39. Buddy
    It would appear that some of Buddy’s humans have indeed written off their fellow people. Does this matter? Honigmann’s film doesn’t plumb this potentially resonant question, as it’s hesitant to look a gift dog in the mou
  40. Maggie's Plan
    As a writer and director, Rebecca Miller is at her best when she finds the shared wavelengths of her lead cast's divergent styles.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Testament of Youth
    The film's inferno of horrors are undoubtedly visceral, but psychologically implosive rather than entrails-exploding.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Like Someone in Love
    Plays out as a city-mouse rejoinder to the rustic, open-air daydream of Certified Copy, a snarl of thorny free jazz to that film's graceful aria.
  43. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.
  44. Sid and Nancy
    Sid & Nancy, in its first half, offers an immersive plunge into the punk lifestyle, capturing with wit and verve its anti-authoritarian sneer and DIY ethos, before then slowly circling the drain during a dour second half given over to disillusion and dissolution.
  45. Lady Macbeth
    It isn't until its final moments that Lady Macbeth turns into the kind of meaningless, mean-spirited, and proudly irredeemable non-character study that likens it to, say, last year's emptily foreboding Childhood of a Leader.
  46. El Sicario: Room 164
    A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.
  47. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Mitra Farahani rescues the doc from becoming a talking-head fest by embracing her creative self as a character and exposing the travails of her own authorship process.
  48. By the Stream
    Art is a mode of potential connection built in large part on narcissism, and Hong Sang-soo is without peer these days in wrestling that irony onto the screen.
  49. Chico & Rita
    A shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba -- when the nation was a tropical paradise for the delectation of American jetsetters -- and what the revolution left in its wake.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Something in the Air
    Despite a fixation on fire as a cleansing agent (explosions, burning paintings, or a blazing house), the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.
  51. Dolemite Is My Name
    After its promising first act, Craig Brewer’s film becomes a series of fleeting bits, allowing questions to pile up.
  52. Rebirth
    If Rebirth's subjects are active guides documenting a fluid psychological landscape, Jim Whitaker constructs a specific cinematic geography around them with stunning time-lapse photography of Ground Zero.
  53. Guardians of the Galaxy
    For every scene that soars into the dizzying heights of the pop sublime, there's another that crashes back down into the mundane troughs of studio-mandated formula.
  54. Nana
    Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.
  55. The Unspeakable Act
    Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.
  56. The Hunter
    In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.
  57. Lore
    Copious amounts of landscape and wilderness shots cover up its schematic plot, as its indirect visual allusions take precedence over thematic development.
  58. We Are Little Zombies
    The film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries.
  59. A Prayer Before Dawn
    A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.
  60. I Carry You with Me
    Heidi Ewing’s tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn.
  61. Corsage
    Writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s boldly restive biopic imagines Empress Elisabeth of Austria as a deeply restless soul chafing against the social limitations of her day.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Takashi Miike lets his familiar tastelessness get the better of him, relishing the grisly seppuku-by-bamboo in unnecessary detail.
  63. Dirty Wars
    Ably leads us through its extensive investigation, faltering only when the camera lingers on Jeremy Scahill for a touch too long at the expense of his interview subjects.
  64. Night School
    One may wonder if Night School's most revealing material has been left on the cutting room floor, so as to offer the sort of uplift that inadvertently marginalizes the very inequalities that drive the film.
  65. Red Rocket
    Sean Baker is dedicated at the same time to the material realities of being poor in the United States and to the irreverent artificiality of snap zooms, smash cuts, and unexpected music cues.
  66. Actress
    It convincingly reconciles private passion with public desire by suggesting that, for women in particular, the 21st-century limelight is always on, no matter the setting or venue.
  67. A Monster Calls
    A Monster Calls is both governed and straitjacketed by director J.A. Bayona’s competent impersonality.
  68. Buck
    Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.
  69. Elza (Le bonheur d'Elza)
    Capitalizes on a vibrant tropical location and a cast of capable, but the narrative makes disconcerting leaps from the poignant to the distractingly soap-operatic.
  70. Machines
    Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.
  71. Their Finest
    Intimately focusing on its main character's personal triumphs, its refusing to fall into heavy-handed polemicism.
  72. Creepy
    In terms of formal orchestration, Creepy is as sublime as any prior Kiyoshi Kurosawa film.
  73. The White Tiger
    Ramin Bahrani’s film is a turbulent and snarkily self-aware melodrama about breathless social climbing.
  74. The Stroll
    The Stroll is overtly broad, detached, and full of ready-made empowerment rhetoric.
  75. Silent Souls
    Folklore, rituals, and the past weigh heavily on Silent Souls, which is somewhat endemic of films from Fedorchenko's home country of Russia.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Reds
    Reds is finally just an appealingly conventional epic movie-star romance with radical trimmings, but it contains several sharper elements that suggest the colorful period it seeks to recreate.
  77. Islands
    The film is most interesting when it's keyed to its main character's existential malaise across what plays out like a White Lotus B-plot.
  78. The Colors Within
    The film is able to suggest great depths by withholding so much, by having characters express what they feel only in abstract terms during a fraught, transitional period of their lives.
  79. The Snake Pit
    As Virginia grapples with her inner demons, as well as a memory loss that leaves her disoriented and unsure of who she can trust, The Snake Pit periodically transcends its archaic psychological trappings to become an empathic examination of a woman battling both the internal and external forces that seek to fully erase her sense of self.
  80. It Felt Like Love
    Eliza Hittman's film captures the exclusive properties of sex with a degree of intimacy and empathy that, at times, feels authentically revelatory.
  81. Outside In
    Lynn Shelton's film firmly resists supplying its main characters with easy, you-can-have-it-all answers.
  82. Zappa
    The documentary is determined not to be a typical rock-god story with predictable rise-and-fall arcs.
  83. Peter Pan
    Peter Pan, in retrospect, seems much more a footnote among the studio’s 1950s output.
  84. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    It brims with empathy and righteous outrage at the treatment of trans people, but with only a vague organizational structure, it ultimately feels scattershot, passionately covering a number of important issues without quite unifying them into a coherent whole.
  85. Flight
    A unique, audacious studio movie, kicking off as a star-driven spectacle before whittling itself down to a raw and riveting character study.
  86. 99 Homes
    Ramin Bahrani's talent for orchestrating sequences of tightly wound tension is in full bloom here, as is his complementary knack for quieter grace notes.
  87. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    It pulses with relevancy in a time when debates over authoritarianism, protests, and the necessity of radicalism are convulsing America.
  88. Cloud
    Kurosawa Kiyoshi is an empathetic yet pitiless poet of the modern void.
  89. A Cop Movie
    Alonso Ruizpalacios voices a profound sense of powerlessness on the part of the police without sentimentalizing the abuses and biases of the profession.
  90. Flora and Son
    Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.
  91. The Lunchbox
    The patience in mercurially presenting the characters' backstories and desires is matched by the film's genuine curiosity about the healing power of sharing stories.
  92. This Ain't California
    While the film is deeply romantic and nostalgic, possessing a genuine reverence for youth and rebellion, it's also something of a tragedy.
  93. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    Its discursiveness does have the intriguing effect of leaving behind a myriad of impressions about its subjects rather than settling on pat interpretations.
  94. The Death of Louis XIV
    Catalan prankster Albert Serra's film ultimately emerges as a compact, improbably riveting viewing experience.
  95. Rebel Ridge
    Rebel Ridge never rises to the panic-infused heights of its opening, but Jeremy Saulnier is still able to maintain a baseline of oppressive tension as we watch a man navigate the deep-seated corruption of a sundown town.
  96. The Cranes Are Flying
    One of the greatest films of the Soviet era.
  97. Cartel Land
    A stunning work of war reportage nestled within a creaky study of ideological purity.
  98. We Grown Now
    The film is held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.
  99. The Meaning of Hitler
    Though uneven, the film is clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal of the language of horror.
  100. The Price of Everything
    The film understands that money is a defining element of art-making, whether or not we wish to admit it.
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