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. Black Narcissus
    Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
  2. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    Like few modern films, Alfredo Garcia seems to not only be a product of a director’s singular vision, but a virtual window into one man’s fractured, tortured soul.
  3. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    The documentary exists within the very restricted pantheon of films that successfully reap the cinematic potential of pedagogy.
  4. Husbands and Wives
    Allen bravely posits one’s fear of change and the comfort in finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind.
  5. I Confess
    I Confess ultimately reveals itself to be one of Hitchcock’s most successful examinations of the tension between public image and private turmoil.
  6. Licorice Pizza
    It’s the hints of danger, employed like ghost notes in a shuffling rhythm, that lend the film its sneaky depth of feeling.
  7. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.
  8. Tenebrae
    Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It’s both a riveting horror film and an architect’s worst nightmare.
  9. Underground
    Underground is a unique blend of lowbrow slapstick and sophisticated war commentary, earning it well-deserved comparisons to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be and Not To Be (possibly the funniest movie ever made) and the films of Abbott and Costello.
  10. Yojimbo
    Something of a textbook example of the perfect crowd-pleaser, Kurosawa’s tale is sociopolitical wish fulfillment via archetypal samurai drama, albeit with a twist or three.
  11. The Wrong Man
    The sense of moral responsibility in Hitchcock’s films may have never felt more imperative and succinct.
  12. Opera
    Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Red Beard
    The best of Kurosawa’s films are a challenge to look into our greatest fears and at our most terrible afflictions, whether personal or systemic, without turning away. Arguably the best Kurosawa film, Red Beard does not turn away.
  14. An Autumn Afternoon
    The progression of Ozu’s style seems to parallel that of Jacques Tati, who moved from the mutable likes of M. Hulot’s Holiday into the glass-cut inflexibility of Playtime.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Intervista
    Here, Fellini effortlessly weaves together various registers, aesthetic and otherwise, continually undercutting whatever level of “reality” seems to be in front of the camera(s) at any given time.
  16. Joyland
    Joyland is full of extraordinary situations that prevent it from being defined by its topicality or tantamount to a badge of honor.
  17. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Chantal Akerman’s 1975 experiment in film form, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is an astonishing work of subtextual feminism which has to count as one of the seminal films of the 1970s.
  18. The Rules of the Game
    Low comedy walks hand and hand with tragedy and beauty throughout; the film is frothy one minute, nearly apocalyptic the next, and so you’re never fully allowed to gather your bearings.
  19. Playtime
    With Playtime, Tati made one of the most fully inhabitable films ever.
  20. Cléo from 5 to 7
    Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early-’60s Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard’s Breathless.
  21. The Passion of Joan of Arc
    The Passion of Joan of Arc remains the moment that [Dreyer] guided his medium to new heights, and also crafted a work that would endure outside of any specific context.
  22. Our Body
    Our Body offers, in its unwavering commitment to staring at the fragility of life in the eye, a solace devoid of romanticism or spiritual self-delusion.
  23. Fireworks
    It’s a weird experience that Kitano is offering to movie audiences: We thrill to the violent, heroic exploits that leave many a pierced eyeball, many a severed limb, many a bullet-riddled corpse, but we find uplift in his celebration of community, music, dance, light, color, and companionship.
  24. The Mother and the Whore
    Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lady Killer (Gueule d’Amour)
    Exquisite and disturbing, Gueule d’Amour is still one of the screen’s least seen masterpieces.
  26. Xala
    Widely regarded as Ousmane Sembène’s finest achievement, Xala is a cutting morality tale that equally blames the corruption of Senegal’s sociopolitical environment on Euro-centricity and African auto-destruction.
  27. The Beast
    Bertrand Bonello uncannily utilizes burdensome signs and wonders for maximum insight and agitation.
  28. Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
    With Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.
  29. Le Samouraï
    Melville’s 1967 masterpiece, which—through assuming the same systematic attention to detail as its iconically cool protagonist—achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty and grace.
  30. I Am Cuba
    I Am Cuba is a cinephile’s wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn’t so humane.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Charley Varrick
    Ultracool.
  32. Marty Supreme
    Marty Supreme rapturously reprises a siren song that transcends any single American era, beckoning hustlers to heed its call.
  33. The Tales of Hoffmann
    Though lacking the thematic depth that characterized the Archers’ earlier work, The Tales of Hoffmann ranks among their finest triumphs for its purely aesthetic self-justification.
  34. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    Tati biographer David Bellos called 1953’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday “Tati’s most perfect film,” and in many ways, it’s difficult to disagree with this sentiment in terms of tone and form.
  35. Compensation
    Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.
  36. El
    Though set in Mexico and ripe with authentic details from daily life, Él is less a portrait of machismo gone awry than it is a brutal and absurd glimpse at one man’s runaway paranoia.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Breathless
    What remains most striking, and most moving, about Godard’s first feature is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism.
  38. Hard Boiled
    There’s a moral “quality” to the bloodshed that you won’t find in your average Hollywood action film.
  39. Queen at Sea
    As much as Binoche is the backbone of Queen at Sea, Courtenay and Calder-Marshall’s raw performances are no less impressive.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Summer Hours
    It’s a testament to Assayas’s empathy that he is able to build the entirety of his drama in the distance between his principals’ forgivable self-interest and their quiet kindness.
  41. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Radiating a startling intensity, the film demands to be reckoned with.
  42. You, the Living
    Humor and sorrow are equally immediate emotions throughout, whether in the writer-director's traditionally structured setup-punchline scenes or his strange non sequiturs
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    How to Train Your Dragon
    This kid flick is just plain smart, packed full of imagination and surprise.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Dark Days
    The documentary enables its viewers to confront poverty on a human level by presenting its subjects, for the most part, like anyone else, living lives, despite their socioeconomic difference, relatable to our own.
  45. Ichi the Killer
    Unhinged even for Takashi Miike, Ichi the Killer suggests a bloody and ejaculate-stained Rorschach inkblot, reveling in ultraviolence that can be interpreted to flatter any adventurous audience's sensibilities.
  46. Manhunter
    Mann’s focus is so esoteric that he slowly turns the garish thriller into a kind of poetry.
  47. The Breakfast Club
    The quintessential Brat Pack vehicle, hampered by Hughes’s willingness to pigeonhole his protagonists in exactly the same manner as they accuse Vernon of doing, The Breakfast Club is hopelessly tethered to its era in ways that the same year’s other major high school-themed blockbuster, Back to the Future, isn’t.
  48. Sunset Boulevard
    Sunset Boulevard posits that the business and process of making films can often turn writers and directors into soulless scavengers of narrative detritus, performers into howling husks of wasted talent.
  49. The Devil's Backbone
    With The Devil's Backbone, Del Toro pulls an Amenábar by dishing out sophisticated war commentary with bone-chilling dread.
  50. A Room with a View
    A Room with a View is a masterful example of how to take well-regarded literary source material, render it in a manner that displays the visual markers of middlebrow sophistication, like ornamental costume design and fine-tuned “art direction,” as the Oscars like to call it, and intersperse it with surface-level controversies, like three heterosexual men chasing each other around a pond with their dicks out.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    In Holy Grail, they put their talents to work on a larger scale, mixing wonderful satires on the Medieval legend and lifestyle with tremendous comic timing and blatant dirty jokes.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Big Lebowski
    There are few films that genuinely get better with each successive viewing. The Big Lebowski is one of them. This is owed not only to its near-infinite quotability, which itself grows with time, given how much of the film’s humor is self-referential, but also because its tangled plot requires a substantial amount of unraveling before it can be fully understood and appreciated.
  53. Hero
    Hero is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering. Everything a wu xia should be…and then som
  54. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
    The film remains a stunning collective of method acting and 1970s social critique.
  55. Manhattan
    Gordon Willis's too-dark lensing is an ideal match for the Scenes from a Marriage-inspired sequences of marital and amorous discord.
  56. Breakfast at Tiffany's
    Blake Edwards’s discontent-but-charmed portrait of a long-lost New York state of blithe is, like most Blake Edwards films, narratively scattershot but reliably fixated on the cinematic chemistry of social relations in a mod (and post-mod) era, which invariably boil down to genders and the extent to which individuals ascribe to their assigned sex roles.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    JFK
    JFK still retains a primal power; no number of derivative, headache-inducing CSI episodes can blunt the impact of Stone's aggressive visuals, and the film's plea for accountability and honesty in government is as vital now as ever.
  58. Easy Rider
    This legendary tale of a motorcycle odyssey gone wrong remains timeless for its diagnosing of the early stages of a social ennui that has now fully bloomed.
  59. Popeye
    Altman directs the complex web of social interactions with a frame that’s both inclusive and prying. And the actors he collected and dropped in Malta’s simulated community help evoke an atmosphere that is genial yet guarded. Shelly Duvall couldn’t possibly have played Olive Oyl badly.
  60. 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Tree of Life
    The Tree of Life's fetching images are like glowing shards of glass, and together they form a grandiose mirror that reflects Malick's impassioned philosophical outlook. It's unquestionably this great filmmaker's most personal work, a revelation of how he came to be, why he creates, and where he feels he's going.
  62. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn't just flattery, it's an indication of his method.
  63. The Descendants
    In a development that seemed to begin in earnest with "Sideways," a large part of The Descendents seems to operate on a non-narrative level.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Damsels in Distress
    The clash of styles in Damsels in Distress is bewildering and then disarming.
  65. Immortals
    Dashing across the screen in all its bloody, gilded glory, the awesome and beautiful Immortals marks an all-win scenario.
  66. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    Order may be restored to the Circus, the "bad" elements weeded out, but in the jaundiced world the film has spent the last two hours so effectively delineating, the barriers between good and evil have been shown to be essentially meaningless.
  67. Iron Man 3
    A madly creative, darkly comical, and fiendishly self-aware actioner with muscle to spare.
  68. Nostalgia for the Light
    Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.
  69. Attenberg
    A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Skyfall
    Bond's latest is a remarkable high watermark for the series: at once solemn and deeply funny, sexy and sad, self-conscious without all the rib-bruising elbowing.
  71. Moonrise Kingdom
    Although the film remains continually fanciful, it always reminds us of the stakes in which precocious childhood rubs up against the possibility of a childhood denied altogether.
  72. Bellflower
    Evan Glodell's debut has the sweetness of a lullaby reverie and the blazing ferocity of a monster-car nightmare, a first-comes-elation, then-comes-madness structure that resembles that of "Blue Valentine," another tale focused on the commencement, and then collapse, of an affair.
  73. Tuesday, After Christmas
    At first glance, Tuesday, After Christmas seems, in both form and content, only a modestly ambitious endeavor. Yet the singular attention with which it carries out its aims-and the rigorous success it ultimately attains-is nonetheless unsparing, and bracing.
  74. Resident Evil: Retribution
    At this point in the franchise, Anderson is content to alight the saga on a perpetual rewind loop, ever-ending, ever-rebooting, all subsidized by his nonpareil compositional sense.
  75. Looper
    As in the very best Anthony Mann and John Ford westerns, Looper at once understands the visual power of violence and is deeply critical of it.
  76. Polytechnique
    Though it's as schematic in construction as Incendies, the film doesn't grind along to a ponderous plot; it's unnerving abstraction of its subject matter more daringly relays Villeneuve's view of the human cost of gender warfare.
  77. Impolex
    It lulls us into its reckless passivity to the point that even the comedic duds possess a languid hint of funny.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Interrupters
    An inspirational and heartbreaking nail-biter, The Interrupters was more difficult for me to watch than any battle documentary I've seen in years.
  79. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987)
    The film uses a country-mouse-and-city-mouse template to explore morality, aesthetic sense, urban and rural savvy, and a host of other concerns.
  80. The Last Stand
    One of its most refreshing aspects is its acceptance of both western and action-film conventions on their own terms, refusing to regard itself as operating outside of or superior to the genre.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Mysteries of Lisbon
    A marvelously elastic storyteller, a dry wit, and a Rivettean anti-determinist, the Chilean auteur Raúl Ruiz is fascinated by narratives that dilate from within, images seemingly full of secret passageways, and fabulists who collect tales like toys.
  82. The Mouth of the Wolf
    We experience the delay of the fantasy of the happy old couple in their country home in cinematic time as, for most of the film, the only body these lovers have is the spellbinding combination of visual fragments serving as apparitions to their voices.
  83. Gravity
    Alfonso Cuarón's triumph is an invigoratingly clean, elegant display of action choreography, a La Région Centrale you can still take grandma to see.
  84. A Separation
    Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.
  85. Weekend
    A ticking stopwatch hangs over Weekend that amplifies the intensity of every conversation, every fight, every drink, every copulation. In other words, it's a device.
  86. Outrage
    It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Le Havre
    For Carl Dreyer, to film a miracle took a single shot; for Bruno Dumont, a whole film. In Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki needs four shots to capture his - and what an ordinary event it is!
  88. 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.
    • 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.
  90. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    Manages to be intimate and impersonal at the same time, a trait constantly reinforced by his portrayal of not only Ceausescu but the populace he led, represented, and controlled for nearly three decades.
  91. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is pure pedagogic bliss.
  92. Inside Llewyn Davis
    As played by an eloquently beleaguered Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis is arguably the most vivid and complex character the Coens have dreamed up since Marge Gunderson.
  93. Silver Bullets
    Joe Swanberg's idea of making audiences "happy" is by acknowledging what his supporters and detractors have been saying about him for a number of years, but presenting these things within the same game of elliptical story-unraveling and confession that's governed most of his other films.
  94. Into the Abyss
    Underlying the occasionally harrowing, consistently mournful tone is a philosophy that, more than being explicitly anti-capital punishment, puts both family ties and the social contract at the center of people's self-worth.
  95. The Innkeepers
    Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.
  96. Perfect Sense
    Visually glassy and smooth, Perfect Sense values the dynamic mood of each scene without being overly stylized.
  97. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    The film captures Vreeland's perhaps unwitting philosophical integrity just as much as it drowns us in the exuberance of her work.
  98. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Few other British films from that period seem to mythologize the pre-war period of Churchill's youth and early career quite as potently as Colonel Blimp.
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