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. Touch Me Not
    Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.
  2. Werewolf
    The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.
  3. Unfriended: Dark Web
    The film is preposterously conceived, but writer-director Stephen Susco so tightly, excitingly executes it that you hardly notice.
  4. The Guardians
    The film captures the pictorial beauty of old-fashioned farm life, but director Xavier Beauvois is careful not to romanticize hard labor for its own sake.
  5. 12 Days
    With a tender and respectful gaze, 12 DAYS (@distribfilmsus) sheds light on the relationship between the French state and the mentally ill.
  6. Wild Nights with Emily
    The film’s playful tone is a corrective to a century of scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto Emily Dickinson.
  7. Death Becomes Her
    Death Becomes Her is one of the few mainstream comedies that you don’t feel even had to try to be outlandish. It was simply born that way.
  8. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    The effect of Sophie Fiennes's unmoored approach to her subject is to take us out of normal time and put us on Grace Jones time.
  9. Winter Brothers
    If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship.
  10. Cocote
    Nelson Carlo de Los Santos's first fiction feature is a dazzling collage of styles and approaches in which every scene feels different from the one that came before.
  11. Revenge
    Fetishism, parody, and various registers of violence propel a livewire thriller that mines the free-floating hostility existing between genders.
  12. Big Fish & Begonia
    In the sly exchanges between the teenage protagonists and their elders, the film reflects a nation's shifting tides.
  13. 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.
  14. Hitler's Hollywood
    Rüdiger Suchsland’s film is a master class in the relationship between image production and ideology writ large.
  15. The Towering Inferno
    In nearly every reasonable sense it’s the far more accomplished of the two famed Allen disaster epics.
  16. The Escape
    It deals with a very ordinary emergency with deftness of touch, and the power of a singular performance.
  17. Clash of the Titans
    These fantastical He-Man epics were common in the early ’80s (Legend, Conan the Barbarian, and The Beastmaster were all variations of the same theme), and while Clash of the Titans remains one of the genre’s homelier entries, there’s no faulting a film this lovingly and aptly arcane.
  18. McQueen
    As Ian Bonhôte's documentary reveals, Alexander McQueen's suicide was perhaps the all-too-predictable ending to a history of violence.
  19. United Skates
    The documentary brings to the foreground a fascinating and, moreover, beautiful culture lurking in the background of other stories.
  20. 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.
  21. Ray Meets Helen
    After 15 years away from the cinema, Alan Rudolph reminds one of the suggestive potency of his films.
  22. The Cable Guy
    The director, who intermittently shows up on Steven’s television as Stan and Sam Sweet, a hybrid of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, shoots all of this with verve and fluidity to spare, though he succeeds most commendably in framing and editing his star’s physical antics.
  23. The Stepford Wives
    Forbes’s direction is uncluttered and makes excellent use of the long shot, and though the film threatens to run out of steam at each and every turn, it never runs out of ideas.
  24. The Image You Missed
    The film finds Dónal Foreman exploring the suggestive gaps that exist between his own biography and that of his father.
  25. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    The film’s action is the most extreme encapsulation yet of Dwayne Johnson’s bombastic blockbuster work.
  26. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The title alone of Kirby Dick’s alleged documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist practically screams: This is not your standard biopic!
  27. Cold War
    The film is most exhilarating as a breathless vessel for mood, one that just so happens to conduct itself within reconstructed period settings that are as obsessively detailed as the reverently curated soundtrack.
  28. 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.
  29. El Angel
    El Angel‘s greatest accomplishment is in the way it charges the relationships between characters with so much eroticism but never grants us the right to watch desire — other than desire for violence — actually unfold.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harold and Maude
    The effortless depiction of their growing camaraderie and unconscious courtship is one of Harold and Maude‘s great charms, as Ashby and screenwriter Colin Higgins transpose fading ideology into boundless truth across a modest framework of pitch-black exposition and glowingly pastoral aesthetic touches.
  31. Asako I & II
    Like Happy Hour, Asako I & II is a parable of the grace — and, yes, happiness — that spring from resignation.
  32. 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.
  33. The Image Book
    It’s through exercising a certain kind of madness that the film connects even at its most disjointed.
  34. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Somehow, Bi Gan’s film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences.
  35. 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.
  36. Sorry Angel
    Much more interesting than Jacques and Arthur's relationship is Christophe Honoré's subtle portrait of the early '90s as a time of accelerated mortality and mourning, but also of material encounters of all kinds.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Woman at War
    It balances its various modes so carefully and efficiently that it achieves a graceful unity, if a strange one at that.
  38. 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.
  39. The Last House on the Left
    It’s the ultimate Vietnam allegory, except there’s no room for peace here, just war.
    • 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.
  41. Breath
    This isn't a film about surfing so much as one about riding a wave that must eventually break and recede.
  42. Enter the Dragon
    The lack of sentimentality helps focus the viewer on what the film depicts exceptionally well, namely wanton bad behavior and enthralling, wall-to-wall ass-kicking.
  43. The Truth
    The tactility of earlier Hirokazu Kore-eda imagery has been traded for a softer, more luscious, nevertheless melancholic dream world.
  44. The Cakemaker
    The film binds its narrative to fascinating explorations of national identity, sexuality, and, of course, food.
  45. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
    Of all the ’70s road movies, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot may be the only one in which the characters find themselves.
  46. We the Animals
    In We the Animals, director Jeremiah Zagar sustains a tone of wounded nostalgia, fashioning a formalism that appears to exist simultaneously in the past and present.
  47. A Perfect World
    Hancock lays the groundwork for Eastwood to transform what might have been an admirable, tightly told entertainment into something far more emotionally resonant, slyly self-aware, and rich in subtext.
  48. A Star Is Born
    The film is equal parts I Will Survive and pop martyrdom, instigated by a star so enormous that she could likely bankroll the Department of Defense for the year of 1976 and still have money left over.
  49. A Star Is Born
    Despite A Star Is Born’s musty jabs at movieland decadence in the wake of satires like Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful, it was the craft found in Cukor’s alternately splashy and shadowy mise-en-scène, and displayed by Mr. James Mason, that most greatly aided Mrs. Sid Luft.
  50. 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.
  51. Phenomena
    The whole of Phenomena is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often terrifying and exhilarating.
  52. Elizabeth Harvest
    Sebastian Gutierrez's film creates an incestuous atmosphere that's reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
  53. Studio 54
    The documentary nurtures our sympathy for Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager without shortchanging their hypocrisies.
  54. Cut Throat City
    Cut Throat City is still an ambitious and volatile film, an atmospheric survey of the thankless world of the rich and the damned.
  55. The Poseidon Adventure
    A nightmarishly schematic fantasia of guiltless discomfort.
  56. Green Book
    Peter Farrelly manages to respect the severity of the characters’ social context while ensuring that Green Book never steps outside its protagonists’ relationship, a delicate balancing act that credibly makes a feel-good, effervescent comedy out of its thorny subject matter without ever sanitizing it.
  57. The Brood
    Undoubtedly [Cronenberg's] best from this period and also the most troubling.
  58. Southern Comfort
    Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.
  59. 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.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    8 Million Ways to Die
    It’s a fine swan song for Ashby.
  61. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    Hale County dwells on the beauty of the everyday as it recognizes the fragility of individual lives.
  62. Our Time
    The film elides politics in order to earnestly consider whether love is necessarily an act of possession.
  63. Notorious
    Love is a dark, corroded obsession in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a black-velvet biocide brimming with notes of tabloid titillation, spy-versus-spy nonsense, and romance as rotten as a half-eaten Granny Smith left out in the summer sun.
  64. A Quiet Place Part II
    John Krasinski is most in his comfort zone when the importance of family and legacy drives the film’s tension.
  65. Cold Pursuit
    It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.
  66. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    Sasha Waters Freyer forges a poignant portrait of an artist attempting to transcend the limitations of his art by refusing to see the process through.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    306 Hollywood
    Elan and Jonathan Bogarín's film blends various tones and visual styles with confidence and infectious exuberance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Stranger
    As distinctively Wellesian as Citizen Kane, and packing nearly as many technical wonders.
  69. A Land Imagined
    Writer-director Yeo Siew Hua suggests that becoming another person is as easy as dreaming it.
  70. Greta
    Neil Jordan’s deft control of pace and tone elevates Greta past mere gimmickry, resulting in a comic thriller whose goofy humor only compounds its mastery of suspense.
  71. In Fabric
    Strickland’s film is another fetish object that rues the perils of fetishism.
  72. Caniba
    Throughout Caniba, there’s a singularly disquieting relationship between the filmmakers’ formal experimentation and their subject.
  73. Critters 2
    Critters 2: The Main Course offers a heaping helping of everything that’s missing from the first film: a reasonably intelligent and witty script, a supple and unchained playfulness, and an anarchic mélange of diverse genre riffs.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Exorcist III
    Few people love William Friedkin, John Boorman, and Paul Schrader as much as I do, but in my book, of the six or so films that have tried to turn that tortured title into a continuing franchise, Blatty’s The Exorcist III is the best, hands down.
  75. The Return of the Living Dead
    Suffice to say, this small offering from the horror genre is a hoot to watch, with never a dull moment.
  76. Happy Death Day 2U
    Happy Death Day 2U pushes further than even matters of life and death into a realm in which stakes don’t even really apply anymore, concerned as it is not with how we live our best lives, but with how we can be the best possible versions of ourselves.
  77. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
    Kaku Arakawa's documentary is a candid snapshot of a great artist as an old man.
  78. Tyrel
    Sebastián Silva never indulges platitude, and so the qualified hope of the film’s ending isn’t merely affirming but also miraculous.
  79. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    This is the most disturbing spin on the invasion premise, because it still permits the simple, classical predator/parasite interpretation, but, at the same time, makes the infiltration total, because the snatchers don’t just take your body, your memories, your brains—they take you. All of you.
  80. Night of the Living Dead
    So yeah, if you can’t tell already, my giddiness has by this point evaporated, but my staunch belief in this muddled little gem has not yet substantially wavered.
  81. Tito and the Birds
    The Brazilian animated feature offers relief from the impersonal assault of contemporary pop culture.
  82. On Her Shoulders
    The film is most interested in homing in on the ways Nadia Murad's fragility and self-doubt arise as collateral damage from her fame and steadfast activism.
  83. The Price of Everything
    The film understands that money is a defining element of art-making, whether or not we wish to admit it.
  84. Rambo: Last Blood
    The Looney Tunes nature of Rambo’s murder spree tempers much of the script’s ideological offense.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Fox and the Hound
    A wounded and unresolved movie free of the expected Disney cutesiness and complacency.
  86. Of Fathers and Sons
    The film's verité approach risks humanizing Abu Osama, but we eventually gain a complex understanding of the banality of his evil.
  87. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    Alexis Bloom’s keenly insightful and deeply depressing documentary is probably best viewed not as a record of the past but a document of what’s to come.
  88. The Vanishing
    The Vanishing seems truly troubled by its action violence in a way that many similar thrillers aren’t.
  89. Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett
    Luke Fowler allows us to access some of the intimate details of Bartlett’s life in intriguingly indirect ways.
  90. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    This sharp, to-the-point portrait of the crook, fixer, and right-wing pitbull resists the urge to darkly glamorize him.
  91. This One's for the Ladies
    There’s a surprising sense of communal exchange between the male strippers and their fans in Gene Graham’s documentary.
  92. All Is True
    It’s an unfussy, intimate chamber drama that’s fearless in confronting the attitudes of its exalted subject.
    • 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.
  94. Kagemusha
    The film vibrates with a profound respect for historical veracity, the busy intersection between political sociology and psychology, and grunting, portentous masculinity.
  95. Lifeforce
    Watching Lifeforce now is to be reminded that even big-budget films were once allowed to be adventurous and idiosyncratic, even in the 1980s, and that American horror movies were once capable of being fun, sexy, and subversively empathetic.
  96. The Venerable W.
    The Venerable W. is at times downright dowdy, but there’s an ever-present sense of rage and despair burbling beneath its placid surface.
  97. Hard Times
    Hard Times feels most like a brilliant prerequisite to the cinema of Michael Mann, a focused neo-western where the last man standing is the one truest to himself.
  98. Rolling Thunder
    Essentially a liberal vigilante film that’s rife with all the contradictions that description implies, Rolling Thunder has a pared, weirdly principled grace that still packs a punch.
  99. Styx
    The film is a penetrating an indictment of the bureaucratic obstacles placed in front of refugees.
  100. An Elephant Sitting Still
    The film’s gritty, mundane agonies come to feel like a series of moral tests with genuinely unpredictable outcomes.
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