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. 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.
  2. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.
  3. Keep the Change
    With a surprisingly compassionate eye, the film susses out the comic and tragic elements borne from the daily struggle of living with autism.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Major League
    Comedy is the lasting virtue here—and more specifically what veteran screenwriter Ward (The Sting, Sleepless in Seattle) got out of a solid comic framework to make Major League continue to work beyond its odd collection of characters and a very specific setting.
  5. The Challenge
    Here the organic and the frivolously material aren't oppositions or rivals, but partners in a spectacle for men's eyes only.
  6. Icaros: A Vision
    The film has a calming and inevitable quality, and a leisurely sense of pacing that favors image and sound over narrative propulsion, that slows our own biorhythms, fostering our sensorial empathy with the passengers.
  7. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero's film is a phantasmagoria of impressionistic horror, at once despairing, beautiful, haunting, and surreal.
  8. Afterimage
    Andrzej Wajda's film is a lean, unwavering look at the effects of artistic idealism in the face of fascist doctrine.
  9. Ismael's Ghosts
    Arnaud Desplechin’s latest simultaneously collapses and expands his entire body of work, reflexively revealing its many layers, like a pop-up book.
  10. The King
    The King benefits from a quality that's usually a liability in nonfiction films: Its scattershot structure gets at the truth of pop culture as an ineffable chimera that defines much of the world.
  11. Blade of the Immortal
    Takashi Miike's film is a work of robust genre craftsmanship that's informed with a sly sense of self-interrogation.
  12. Before We Vanish
    On its own, this is a fun, broadly satirical alien-invasion film, more self-aware than self-serious, but its beauty, its poignancy, comes from its relationship to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's other work.
  13. Airplane!
    The punchlines come quick and thick, with little foreplay or consideration for anything other than getting a physical reaction from the audience.
  14. The Beach Bum
    With the film, Harmony Korine solidifies his position as the premier cartographer of the Sunshine State as a place of unhurried pursuits.
  15. Rodin
    Jacques Doillon's shrewd ellipses emphasize time as a great and uniting humbler and thief, allowing stray moments to suddenly crystallize unexpressed yearnings.
  16. Barbara
    In Barbara, the process of filmmaking is shown to be a nesting series of shells that allow one to be simultaneously freed and lost.
  17. Makala
    Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.
  18. Legend
    What with the film's cotton-candy mise en the scene, rhyming goblins (“Mortal world turned to ice/Here be goblin paradise”), sexless pixies and elementary light/dark metaphors that reference the order of its universe, Legend is a gothic fairy tale brought to life.
  19. Ascent
    Fiona Tan’s comprehensive project discriminates against no particular era or pedigree of imagery.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It's a Wonderful Life
    Without overlooking It’s a Wonderful Life‘s lapses into populist bathos, it’s necessary to rescue the Frank Capra film from its status as an untouchable American “classic.”
  21. Last Flag Flying
    Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others, and the film ingeniously folds the viewer into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values.
  22. My Journey Through French Cinema
    Bertrand Tavernier's exquisite documentary consistently avoids mere hagiography by looking to the films themselves.
  23. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    On the Seventh Day brings a certain levity to wrenching matters of daily survival by thoroughly humanizing its characters, thus preventing them from feeling as if they're being written as stand-ins for thematic ideas.
  24. School Daze
    School Daze is, if nothing else, a compelling time capsule of racial politics in the late ‘80s, ethnographically sealed-off in a hothouse micro-environment (an all-black college campus) that’s as constrictive as Lee’s varying plot threads and stylistic whims are profuse.
  25. The Reagan Show
    The documentary is an insightful portrait of the former American president and the world that he shaped.
  26. Love After Love
    In every scene, the film's cutting is dictated by the turbulent pace of the characters' inner lives.
  27. Our Beloved Month of August
    Gomes contemplates the many human dimensions wavering under the surface of this town, whether it’s the mythologies crowding a town’s gossip session or the tall tales flooding rants at a local bar. This is a collective voice of character rather than a dry document of reality.
  28. The Crazies
    The Crazies lacks the nightmarish momentum of Romero’s best zombie flicks, but it’s no less astute with its allegorical potshots.
    • 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.
  30. Day of the Dead
    Any real zombie fan knows that political parable and decomposing cannibal corpse gore go together like peanut butter and jelly, but Day of the Dead found the subgenre’s reigning master and poet-in-residence mismanaging the proper ratios a bit.
  31. Season of the Witch
    Romero’s own Belle du Jour, a tale of a lonely, neglected housewife whose discontent and suppressed erotic desires are efficiently conveyed in a series of bondage-tinged dream sequences.
  32. Brad's Status
    The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.
  33. Machines
    Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.
  34. Rememory
    The film successfully argues that it’s through sensory details that we access the deeper aspects of our lives.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Downhill Racer
    In scenes such as the anti-hero’s visit to his resentful father (“World’s full of them,” the old man snaps of his son’s desire to become a champion), Downhill Racer stands as lean condemnation of the calculating underdog clichés Rocky would bring make the norm.
  36. I Spit on Your Grave
    One can’t mistake I Spit in Your Grave for anything other than a raging political text, a rigorous reminder to the power of a disturbed imagination, be it victimizer or victim.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Day of the Soldado's strained credulity in the last act has an undercurrent of kooky exhilaration, as the plot takes leaps that feel as reckless as they are refreshing in such a doleful film of terminal prognoses.
  38. Strong Island
    Yance Ford’s film builds into an emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically complex work of essay and memoir.
  39. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    78/52 comes to life when riffing on the psychosexual perversity of Psycho, which changed cinema's relationship with sex and violence.
  40. 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.
  41. Time Bandits
    Good as the cameos are, however, the lasting draw of the film is its exceptional aesthetic. Gilliam keeps his camera low in a child’s perspective, and wide-angle lenses only exacerbate the magnified sense of scale that everything has.
  42. 1922
    Zak Hilditch's 1922 informs Steven King's pulp feminism with primordial, biblically ugly force.
  43. One of Us
    It's incisive in its condemnation of the oppression innate in the social structure of Brooklyn's Hasidic communities.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Red Dawn
    What if Reagan’s America got a taste of her own interventionist foreign policies? Apocalypse, wow.
  45. Bodied
    The anti-P.C. scorn that establishes a white boy's nervous entry into rap gradually becomes a sincere, if hilarious, treatise on the impossibility of reducing art to value judgments.
  46. Disobedience
    In the end, Disobedience is less about the subjugation of the self to the group than the courage to embrace uncertainty if one were to break out of the prison of a world one has been born into.
  47. Foxtrot
    Icy absurdism and sorrowful ironies abound throughout Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot, whose laughs stick in your throat like the silent screams of its Job-like protagonist.
  48. Mom and Dad
    Writer-director Brian Taylor's Mom and Dad invests a hoary conceit with disturbing and hilarious lunacy.
  49. On Chesil Beach
    The film’s imaginative daring springs from its willingness to render repression sexy, even if it will prove to be the seed of a young couple’s dissolution.
  50. Nico, 1988
    The unflashy, austere visual style of the film is but a veneer over writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli's deceptively radical treatment of the musical biopic.
  51. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    The film poignantly reveals that the secret history of Hollywood is really an alternate history of America.
  52. Sweet Country
    The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.
  53. The Third Murder
    In The Third Murder, as in his other films, Hirokazu Kore-eda informs tragedy with a distinctive kind of qualified humor that's realistic of how people process atrocity.
  54. The Future Perfect
    The Future Perfect has the texture of a novella that keeps reworking the same idea in successively intricate ways.
  55. The Outlaw Josey Wales
    The remnants of war are fractious and far-flung in Clint Eastwood's impressive revisionist western.
  56. 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.
  57. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    Throughout, Christopher Doyle acknowledges that time and reality are often marked by a slippery subjectivity.
  58. Western
    The absence of anything traditionally "painterly" reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the kind of capitalistic pro-growth machinations on display in the film.
  59. Autumn, Autumn
    The film is a record of everyday spaces and the emotionally charged human dramas that pass through them.
  60. Bugs
    It begins as a gleeful deadpan comedy and ends up as an exasperated cri de cœur against our current system of industrialized food production and distribution.
  61. It: Chapter Two
    The film argues we’re stronger and better when we’re home, building communities that can oppress the oppressors and build up so-called “losers.”
  62. Presumed Innocent
    Pakula plays to Ford’s strengths, allowing the actor to use his face more than his words to convey the doubt, shame, and self-loathing Rusty experiences. The film may be more outright gripping during the courtroom scenes, but the quieter scenes between Ford and Scacchi leave more lasting impressions.
  63. Love, Simon
    Greg Berlanti's charmingly heartfelt film is a remarkably successful attempt to give shape to the experience of the closet by drawing an incredibly intimate portrait of a teenage boy about to leave it behind.
  64. Diamond Island
    The filmmaker brings enough original aesthetic touches to the table, as well as a fresh cultural perspective to the broader socioeconomic issues he broaches, that Diamond Island rarely feels derivative.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Chappaquiddick
    John Curran creates room for his characters to think and feel and an environment that encourages us to do the same.
  66. Big Sonia
    Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.
  67. 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.
  68. Perfect Blue
    Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a prescient vision of a modern world defined by media oversaturation and social media validation.
  69. Wet Woman in the Wind
    Akihiko Shiota's sketch-like scenes have an eccentric and volatile intensity, as the filmmaker stages subtly theoretical moments that still allow for spontaneity.
  70. A Quiet Place
    The pleasure of A Quiet Place is in John Krasinski's commitment to imagining the resourceful ways in which a family might survive in this kind of world, then bearing witness to the filmmaker's skillfully constructed methods of putting them to the ultimate test, relentlessly breaking down all of the walls the family has erected to keep the monsters out.
  71. Unsane
    Even Unsane's most ridiculous moments coast on the sheer energy of Steven Soderbergh's aesthetic gamesmanship.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dragnet
    Dragnet winks at its source material often, but besides a committed lead performance by Dan Aykroyd and the return of Webb’s partner, Harry Morgan, little remains of the original show. This ain’t your grandmother’s Dragnet; it’s your deranged drunk uncle’s Dragnet.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Barbarella
    A rambling, shaggy-dog structure as an excuse to flagrantly foreground softcore sexual hijinks tinged with a pungent whiff of social commentary.
  74. Heaven's Gate
    To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity.
  75. Living in Oblivion
    Director Tom DiCillo ingeniously structures the film as a trio of overlapping shorts that cumulatively suggest ripples emanating from a stone tossed in a pond.
  76. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Peter Rida Michail and Aaron Horvath's Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a spastic, Mad magazine-style parody of comic-book movies for the age of superhero overload.
  77. Crazy Rich Asians
    The filmmakers’ ability to seamlessly explore rapidly shifting Chinese cultural norms within the context of the classic trope of a mother who’s hostile toward her son’s partner is the film’s most impressive feat.
  78. Minding the Gap
    Zack and Keire's stunts are action scenes that are imbued with the gravity of the participants' youth, revelry, and need to prove themselves.
  79. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides.
  80. BlacKkKlansman
    Spike Lee styles the film as a popular entertainment, forgoing the theatrical satire typical of his late-period state-of-the-nation joints, like Bamboozled and Chi-Raq, and settling into the accessible rhythms of the contemporary sitcom.
  81. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    It captures the strength of Fred Rogers's convictions even as his gentleness and sincerity fell further out of favor.
  82. 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.
  83. Roma
    Roma is autobiography as autocritique, and in exploring a point of view adjacent to his own, Cuarón appears to have rediscovered his identity as a filmmaker.
  84. Madeline's Madeline
    True to the implications of its title, the devotional insularity of Madeline's Madeline is suffocating, which is appropriate for a film about a mentally imbalanced teenage artist but suffocating nonetheless.
  85. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    Stephen Loveridge fully understands that even the trifurcated title of his film may not be entirely equipped at capturing the extent of M.I.A.'s many-faceted identity.
  86. Colette
    It's the film's concerted emphasis on Colette's ambivalent nature and desires that reveals her to be an artist just ahead of her time, fighting against, yet seduced by, her present.
  87. Lizzie
    The film moves evenly toward a conclusion that feels as inevitable as it does inescapable, while providing a plausible framework for the still-mysterious true crime.
  88. Wildlife
    Wildlife is at once loquacious and laconic, a film in which simple words hold unspoken and unequivocal power, and the space between banal utterances become chasms.
  89. Clara's Ghost
    Bridey Elliott avoids the smug pitfalls of narratives concerned with privileged people drinking themselves into a stupor.
  90. Adrift
    Director Baltasar Kormákur's film is a simple, acutely observed love story that also happens to be a rousingly stripped-down tale of survival.
  91. The Guilty
    The Guilty is a taut chamber thriller dominated by the flinty yet highly emotive visage of actor Jakob Cedergren.
  92. Mandy
    Panos Cosmatos's film is a profoundly violent and weirdly moving poem of male alienation.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    Visually drab and flabby around the edges. Its seamy tale of murder is not layered in any way; what you see (or, in Wilder’s case, hear) is what you get.
  94. Mohawk
    Ted Geoghegan's Mohawk is a survival-of-the-fittest film that's charged with a thunderous urgency.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shag
    As for Fonda, the camera certainly loves her (to quote a famous line by Howard Hawks), but an actor needs a part that will make her a star, and few films since Shag have seen fit to play to her strengths, specifically that perky blond American sass of hers that found perfect expression here.
  96. Outside In
    Lynn Shelton's film firmly resists supplying its main characters with easy, you-can-have-it-all answers.
  97. Steel Magnolias
    MacLaine grabbing Dukakis by the bangs, shoving her head back with a sneering “Have your roots done,” radiates more feminine fellowship than a dozen sisterhoods of the travelling pants. Not bad for a movie that alternates the tragedy of dying young and beautiful against the comedy of growing old and bitter.
  98. Hondros
    Chris Hondros sought to reconcile peerless beauty with unfathomable atrocity, and Greg Campbell’s film follows suit.
  99. Where Is Kyra?
    Terror gradually leaks into the narrative, transforming Where Is Kyra? into a haunting non-traditional thriller.
  100. The Heiresses
    Ana Brun’s performance as Chela anchors our attention where Marcelo Martinessi’s understated visuals might otherwise lose it.
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