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. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    By acknowledging and publicizing its subjects’ writing, the film proves a stirring tribute to those who fight; in their stories, it offers a potent reminder that war is a hell suffered both externally and—more permanently—internally.
  2. Once Upon a Time in America
    As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.
  3. Straw Dogs
    Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.
  4. Encanto
    Encanto doesn’t steer away from the inevitable happy ending one expects from most animated films geared toward children, but it subverts expectations by bringing humanity to even its most flawed characters.
  5. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Like the work it illuminates, the doc feels formally impeccable yet utterly unstaged, a vivid distillation of a distinct and precious life.
  6. Yourself and Yours
    Yourself and Yours‘s commitment to its various extreme ambiguities is a crucial facet of the film’s success.
  7. The Bad Kids
    Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary raises important questions about the limits of pedagogy.
  8. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    Writer-director Joseph Cedar charts Norman's rise-and-fall arc with the attention to detail of a procedural.
  9. A Family Affair
    Throughout A Family Affair, time is continually collapsed to the point where events separated by many years bleed into one another.
  10. Ascent
    Fiona Tan’s comprehensive project discriminates against no particular era or pedigree of imagery.
  11. Ghost Trail
    Jonathan Millet’s film is unconvincing and unnaturally contorted into its shape.
  12. Mistress America
    Mistress America is both the most concentrated and antic film in Noah Baumbach's unofficial New York trilogy.
  13. The Hottest August
    The documentary represents a city ground down by inequality and division, where millions of selves who have by and large given up on one another.
  14. OBEX
    Albert Birney knows that fantasy is a potent force, that it can lead you deep into the worst parts of yourself, or, with the right influences, lead you back to life.
  15. Patience (After Sebald)
    A wide-ranging piece of literary criticism brought to vivid cinematic life, bursting with ideas and inspired visual translations of them.
  16. Border
    The film’s slow reveal of its fantastical elements, which evoke the erratic, dreamlike strangeness of folk tales, makes them all the more unsettling.
  17. Waiting for August
    The distinct lack of domestic drama is precisely what makes the doc so gratifying as a portrait of a family averting turmoil in spite of challenging circumstances.
  18. Ali & Ava
    Ali & Ava once again showcases Clio Barnard’s uncanny ability to capture the insoluble complexities of life.
  19. Emily the Criminal
    The film may not suffer from didacticism, but it’s at its most volcanic when it promises to blossom into a study of a generation’s financial difficulties.
  20. Frank
    The film boldly raises the unanswerable question of whether it's better for an artist to safely isolate his work or tweak it a bit so as to share it with the world.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Easy Money
    The humanization of these antiheroic outlaws doesn't feel forced, but it does feel engineered, and there's never a viewer investment to match the story's wide expanse.
  22. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    One of the subtlest and most extraordinarily fluid of American horror films, Kaufman crafts textured scenes, rich in emotional and object-centric tactility, that cause our heads to casually spin with expectation and dread.
  23. Pow Wow
    Its tension between ethnographic ensemble study and thesis-oriented docu-essay is irreconcilable.
  24. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
    This film essay grapples with the ethical and political considerations raised in the effort to retrieve Césaire from oblivion.
  25. The Naked Gun
    The Naked Gun is of a piece with the “joke in every frame” approach that Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker brought to their best work.
  26. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    It utilizes Maya Angelou's claim as tantalizing bait rather than the starting point for a feature-length thesis statement.
  27. 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.
  28. Sleepless Night
    After a few turns in the modest narrative, an unlikely sense of structural resilience begins to emerge.
  29. The Load
    Chromatically, The Load makes Saving Private Ryan look like The Band Wagon. Yet Glavonic still manages to convey the devastation and numbness that results from atrocity without resorting to exploitation. Trauma is approached obliquely, more a subliminal fact of life than a single psychological rupture to be confronted and mended.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ruben Brandt, Collector
    The film doesn’t apply the necessary touch and precision to balance its sleek, chromed parts into a revving whole.
  31. Nightmare Alley
    Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley viscerally understands the lurid appeal of carnivals and acts of illusion.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Possession
    Many directors have taken full advantage of Adjani’s exotic, ethereal French beauty; only Zulawski saw beyond the exquisite surface to something unsettling. Most disconcerting is the way Adjani can register almost demonic ill-intent while never losing some trace of the alluring.
  33. Blaze
    With Blaze, a fractured story of country music singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, director Ethan Hawke admirably battles the clichés of the musical biopic.
  34. Living the Land
    Huo Meng’s patient, nonjudgmental study of these people tacitly reveals the ways, healthy and otherwise, in which they’ve compartmentalized and continue to process the pain of everything from hard labor to political oppression.
  35. Down by Law
    Divorcing New Orleans from its stereotypes (there’s no ham-fisted Creole dialogue, no digs at the indigenous cuisine), the filmmaker imagines the boiling, boggy city as a purgatory for lost souls, spotted with cinephiliac mold.
  36. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    The doc adopts the viewpoint specifically of those who knew him best, and seeks to separate the person from the emblem.
  37. The Order
    The Order illuminates the pipeline from economic insecurity and racial anxiety into outright white nationalism without casting a sympathetic eye toward the eponymous group’s tenets.
  38. The Punk Singer
    Sini Anderson's film may be another unimaginative fan letter, but at least Kathleen Hannah is worthy of such devotion.
  39. Capernaum
    Zain Al Rafeea's naturalness, however uncanny, only makes the film's maneuverings seem all the more obvious.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sands of Iwo Jima
    Allan Dwan’s film is an intimate rendering of a monumental event, featuring John Wayne in one of his most emotionally complex roles.
  41. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"
  42. José
    Li Cheng gets much closer to capturing his characters’ predicaments when he trusts the images alone.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    House of Pleasures
    A brief history of time and space, according to Bertrand Bonello.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Silicon Cowboys
    Jason Cohen’s slick aesthetics manage to elevate Silicon Cowboys beyond fellow “info dumps” of this caliber.
  45. Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank
    Beautiful loneliness, as the film suggestively reveals, is a texture that Frank knows all too well.
  46. Dina
    We come to understand the camera’s distance from its subjects as an act of respect that allows the complex, funny, and indomitable personalities to shine through.
  47. The Retrieval
    Less old-fashioned than demure and passé, evoking the visual style and rhythms of a 1990s made-for-TV movie rather than a daring, revisionist independent feature.
  48. The Trip to Italy
    Michael Winterbottom and his gifted actors still haven't quite solved the riddle of portraying social disconnection in a manner that's anything other than sporadically involving.
  49. Sauvage / Wild
    The film is a tale about how those who spiral so far out of control become blind, if not immune, to the severity of their symptoms.
  50. Pacifiction
    Pacifiction uses its thin narrative elements as a pretense to explore the texture of uncertainty, suspicion, and inaction.
  51. Stan & Ollie
    At its best, Stan & Ollie shows how the private and personal dimensions of art are achingly inseparable.
  52. Undine
    The film questions the fixed nature of human behavior in a world whose borders are constantly shifting.
  53. Charlie's Country
    It finally offers little more than a moderately engaging slice of contemporary aboriginal life that mostly fails to dig beneath the surface of this underrepresented world.
  54. Under the Tree
    Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.
  55. Attack the Block
    More "Bloody Kids" than "Super 8," more "Assault on Precinct 13" than "Jumanji," and, in the end, more "Be Kind Rewind" than "Adventures in Babysitting."
  56. Cul-de-sac
    Cul-de-Sac remains a searing reminder that Roman Polanski’s idiosyncratic grasp of the human mind was once evinced theatrically, rather than through narrative ferocity.
  57. The Wolf of Wall Street
    Martin Scorsese's keyed-up, irreverent tone frequently fails to distinguish itself from the grunting arias sung by the oily paragons of commerce his film evidently intended to deflate.
  58. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.
  59. Notes on Blindness
    Its fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.
  60. Zombi Child
    Bertrand Bonello’s quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract.
  61. Diamond Tongues
    Throughout, Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson purposely indulge Hollywood formula only to subvert it.
  62. One Cut, One Life
    The doc emerges not so much as a glimpse into the mind of a dying artist than as a factual drama on how loved ones are impacted by an individual's death.
  63. The Two Popes
    There isn’t anything in the bleeding-heart positions espoused by Jorge Bergoglio that complicates Pope Francis’s public persona.
  64. Honey
    Driven by a no-nonsense ethos, the film avoids sentimentality the same way its main character avoids sentiment.
  65. Mala Mala
    The filmmakers aren't really interested in the space between what these women say and what they mean.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    With so many brilliant collaborators and points of view, whose movie—whose dream—is it anyway? Ashby seems to say it’s all of ours.
  67. Notturno
    The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.
  68. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    Though occasionally aesthetically alluring and evocative, feels like an introductory chapter to a more substantive, sprawling study of the actor.
  69. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Throughout the documentary, the undisguised regret and longing of David Lynch's reminiscences are often startling.
  70. Heaven Knows What
    If nothing else, Heaven Knows What is one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory, reliant less on formal gimmickry than on close observation of behavior.
  71. The Son of Joseph
    The insistence of Green’s gaze throughout the film encourages us to look beyond the mechanisms of speech and behavior at the more uncanny movements of the conscience.
  72. Metropolitan
    Metropolitan celebrates and mourns the specific character of a place and time, youthful associations and crushes, a toolkit of values, even if those values are not exactly shared by, say, housewives in Duluth and auto mechanics in Albuquerque.
  73. Fyre
    Chris Smith’s documentary about the 2017 Fyre Festival implosion resists the urge to revel in cheap social media schadenfreude.
  74. Last Summer
    The film somehow feels tight, open and leisurely, and cloaked in dread all at once.
  75. Félicité
    Alain Gomis never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts are meant to fit together.
  76. Goodbye to Language 3D
    Cinema is a vernacular of domination, and quaking with revelations both formal and personal, the film attests that Godard has spent his career apologizing for it.
  77. The French Dispatch
    Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bernie
    A surprisingly shapeless true-crime farce which never creates a convincing context for the odd relationship between a pious East Texas mortician and his sugar mama.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Chasing Ice
    If you need it, the documentary offers a devastating, and often beautifully shot, reality check.
  80. Benedetta
    Throughout Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven builds up a heady, campy mix of religious imagery, corporeal abjectness, and masochism.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    El Norte
    El Norte deserves credit for being one of the first films to engage American cinema in a discourse on the immigrant experience, but its approach to the material—shallow, condescending, and hectoring—undermines its stabs at brutal realism.
  82. The Invisible Woman
    Ralph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past.
  83. Tully
    In Marlo, Diablo Cody has created her most complicated character to date. Would that her writing displayed similar richness and empathy in painting the film's supporting characters.
  84. Born in Flames
    It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.
  85. Pleasure
    The film fiercely homes in at the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.
  86. The Muppets
    The beloved gang's sweet reunion will melt nostalgic adults into laughter and tears, and maybe kids won't mind drippy new Muppet Walter so much.
  87. Time Out of Mind
    The film isn't preachy, but its indie-movie artiness sometimes get in the way of its noble mission, making us think more about the techniques being used than the effects they're meant to create.
  88. Darkest Hour
    The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret
  89. Samson and Delilah
    By examining the relationship between Samson and Delilah through the wrong end of the telescope, Thorton soaks in the arid, unaccommodating surroundings with occasionally oxymoronic lucidity.
  90. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Hark's new film is a consummately bizarre crowd-pleaser that throws everything at the viewer from makeshift plastic surgery by acupuncture to death by spontaneous combustion.
  91. I'll See You in My Dreams
    Highly polished yet never quite slick, it devolves now and then into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters.
  92. Our Little Sister
    The film's reserve softens some of its more piquant observations about tradition and mortality.
  93. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    The film hovers between being a straight-up biopic of Zweig and a diagnosis of neoliberalism's recent ceding to neofascist policy and nationalistic fervor.
  94. 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Django
    In a genre known for endless knock-offs, a trend that includes Django’s 30-plus sequels, Corbucci’s film is notable not only for the artistry of its construction, but also for the underlying anger that fuels its political agenda.
  96. Spy
    It's the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy's performance that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags.
  97. A Chiara
    The film’s initial aimlessness is pleasurable for the way that it allows the viewer to stare at life being processed on the stunned, confused, and ecstatic face of a teenager.
  98. Night Moves
    Like Michael Cera's two recent films with Sebastian Silva, Night Moves reveals the dark core contained within an actor's nice-guy neuroticism.
  99. Casualties of War
    It stands as maybe the only great film by the director that I feel an unconscious crisis of conscience that makes me want to view it without an auteurist context.
  100. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    The documentary is hesitant to show the great work that resulted from Hayao Miyazaki's "grand hobby," never including clips from the classics referred to throughout.
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