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 6.4 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. Bambi
    While not nearly as emotionally impacting as some of Disney’s other classics, Bambi might be the most restrained and lyrical of the bunch, a poem to the simplicity and purity of natural life.
  2. 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.
  3. Bringing Up Baby
    Bringing Up Baby has some delightfully comic sequences, for sure. But I’m less inclined to remember the dynamics of the gag than Grant and Hepburn’s timing.
  4. Nostalgia for the Light
    Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Gatekeepers
    Even when the so-called Gatekeepers offer up damning testimony against their organization, there's no real threat that they'll ever be held accountable for it.
  6. Little Fugitive (re-release)
    The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.
  7. The Brutalist
    Brady Corbet builds on celluloid what Adrien Brody’s László Toth does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character.
  8. La Chimera
    In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone.
  9. The Worst Person in the World
    The film may be the prime example of how to restore fun, significance, and even a little bit of sex to the well-worn terrain of the romantic comedy.
  10. 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.
  11. Only Yesterday (1991)
    It uses the trappings of the family melodrama to reveal the subtle social constraints that inhibit people, particularly women, from attaining full self-realization.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Seeds
    Brittany Shyne’s lens is held rapt by the ramblings and insights of the elderly, but it springs to life when it’s turned toward the next generation, whose future is of utmost concern in light of the socioeconomic tensions documented by the film.
  13. First Cow
    The sense of a nascent community rising up out of the primordial muck is palpable, so it’s unfortunate that John Magaro and Orion Lee's characters ultimately feel outside it all.
  14. Mad Max: Fury Road
    George Miller orchestrates the rubber-burning pandemonium with the illicit smirk of someone who knows he's giving us exactly what we want.
  15. 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.
  16. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    The courtroom's cramped, near-featureless air of bureaucratic stagnation becomes oppressive even for the audience, making it easy to identify with Viviane's growing hunger for freedom.
  17. I Called Him Morgan
    Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.
  18. All of Us Strangers
    Andrew Haigh’s film always feels perched on the precipice of unlocking a deeper register.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Hustler
    With solid performances, a great jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins, and a virtual clinic in how to do black-and-white cinematography thanks to Eugene Shuftan’s camerawork, The Hustler reaffirms your faith in the movies.
    • 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.
  21. Procession
    Robert Greene’s gaze is an attempt to accord his subjects the dignity of attention, utilizing cinema as a form of emotional due process.
  22. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Abdellatif Kechiche reveals through his sense of composition, and collaboration with his remarkable actresses, a sensitivity to emotional nuance that's striking.
  23. Phantom Thread
    Phantom Thread arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema.
  24. 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.
  25. Silent Friend
    Despite loose ends, it’s one of the most dreamily affectionate (and affectionately critical) portrayals of the natural sciences ever committed to the screen.
  26. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Despite all this macabre torment, It's Such a Beautiful Day involves a lot of sweet, plucky humor that represents a discreet softening of the angry sarcasm for which Hertzfeldt has become known.
  27. Paths of the Soul
    Zhang Yang achieves an astonishing immediacy by simply allowing the prostration process to play out over and over with minimal aesthetic interference.
  28. The Souvenir: Part II
    Joanna Hogg’s film is a work of understated warmth, profound emotional complexity, and eminently British dry humor.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    This Is Not a Film
    In its way, this effort is both a forceful assertion of the most stifling brand of auteurism and a radical reconfiguration of its political potential.
  30. Sound of Falling
    The past comes off in Mascha Schilinski’s film as an onerous, if unseen, weight on the present.
  31. Green Border
    The journeys that Jan and Julia undergo feature such obvious narrativization that they cannot help but feel a bit out of sync with the more observation segments featuring the refugees.
  32. Oppenheimer
    For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Paths of Glory
    Paths of Glory may be first-rate humanity, but it’s also second-rate art.
  34. 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.
  35. High and Low
    High and Low is a masterful cinematic elevator connecting two warring social perspectives, finding a common ground between them in the pressurized corners of the classic crime drama.
  36. Big Men
    No one corporation or person plans to trample over the wellbeing of the Ghanaian people, but as the story of the development progress, the breadth of Rachel Boynton's research shows how it will occur regardless.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Circus
    It is Chaplin’s great elegy to the lost art of music-hall pantomime and, for that matter, the soon-to-be lost art of silent-film comedy.
  38. Paterson
    Paterson's sunny aesthetic and disposition marks a stylistic departure for writer-director Jim Jarmusch.
  39. The Fits
    This singular mix of character study and mysterious mood piece might not have come off quite so successfully if not for Royalty Hightower's internal performance.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Raging Bull
    Scorsese might never again find a subject as ideal as Jake LaMotta, the Bronx-based boxer whose public bouts and private demons Raging Bull chronicles with such bruising acuity.
  41. The Gold Rush (1925)
    Some accuse the director of succumbing to sentimentality, but he’s never less sublime than when he reaches for ridiculous, grandiose highs in romance, coincidence, and naked emotion.
  42. American Hustle
    Formally ostentatious and unrepentantly messy, the film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many '70s period pieces make painfully overt.
  43. The Age of Innocence
    Martin Scorsese captures the exquisite agony and pleasure of passion that’s forced to remain theoretical.
  44. Paris Calligrammes
    While Ulrike Ottinger accesses the most consequential of decades through nostalgia, she does so with humility.
  45. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
    Arie and Chuko Esiri’s film is understated in its attunement to the challenges of trying to escape a stagnant existence.
  46. The Overnighters
    If it ultimately can't reconcile all that's presented in its too-brief runtime, that's largely because its situation, much like the dissonance between those involved, is comprehensibly irresolvable.
  47. Whiplash
    The thrill of watching Fletcher and Neyman's fray unfold is intensified by Damien Chazelle's attention to the craft and challenge of musicianship.
  48. Two-Lane Blacktop
    America exploded in the ’60s; Two-Lane Blacktop is the post-apocalyptic road trip.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    63 Up
    Throughout, the remaining participants take stock of private and career successes as well as perceived failures.
  50. 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.
  51. Two Days, One Night
    The Dardennes believe in human value and social order being rooted in a sense of solidarity, a staggering consciousness of community that brims with a sensitivity to place, movement, and emotion.
  52. 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.
  53. National Gallery
    In the style of an ambling, yet entirely focused visitor, the film continually circles back to pictures, protagonists, and situations to furnish them with new meanings, alter their perception, or even directly challenge their previous presentation.
  54. Force of Evil
    Garfield’s likably unlikable protagonist provides Force of Evil with a semblance of cohesiveness, even if the film often feels like the product of dueling fetishes and pet symbols.
  55. White Heat
    White Heat’s ultimate message: love’s a bitch…even crypto-incestuous love.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    Kurosawa most often did his finest work when combining his idiosyncratic and popular sensibilities into humane, broadly accessible entertainments; it just so happens that The Hidden Fortress remains more unabashedly entertaining than most.
  57. Elle
    This is a film that isn’t afraid to inhabit the maddening ambivalence of pleasure, recognizing that desire simply doesn’t recognize good manners.
  58. Gangs of Wasseypur
    This insane masterpiece shows the self-destructive properties of myth making and how they overlap with the downfall of a community damned from the beginning of time.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    Lee foregoes useless speechifying, opting instead to create an epic document of New Orleans’s struggle, death, abandonment and subsequent reconstruction (a requiem in four acts) that should prove instructive for years to come, if not in facts than for its emotional scope: an up-close, deeply empathetic and soulful journey through the stories that make up this catastrophe.
  60. Minari
    The film’s orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family at its center is steeped in a truly messy situation.
  61. The Farewell
    The film taps into universal truths about the passage of time, the inevitability of loss, and how we prepare one another for it.
  62. Marty Supreme
    Marty Supreme rapturously reprises a siren song that transcends any single American era, beckoning hustlers to heed its call.
  63. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The soft colors, graceful movements, and clean lines together embody the ineffable beauty of life on Earth that is one of the film's main themes.
  64. Captain Blood
    Errol Flynn’s wicked, wicked charm helps keep this high seas adventure afloat.
  65. Great Freedom
    In Great Freedom, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is.
  66. 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.
    • 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.”
  68. Phoenix
    Christian Petzold never luxuriates in all this film history, but rather channels the artifice and affect it embodies into new insights.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Magellan
    The film bluntly puts its historical horrors on display, but it’s careful not to explicitly posit their causes.
  70. Gunda
    By the time the credits roll on the film, we realize we’ve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths.
  71. Western
    After the film's early optimism and speculative midsection, Western struggles to manage all the rich dramatic irony of its final half hour, perched uneasily between plot and stasis.
  72. The Power of the Dog
    The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility.
  73. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    The documentary exists within the very restricted pantheon of films that successfully reap the cinematic potential of pedagogy.
  74. Sullivan's Travels
    Preston Sturges jammed volumes of sociological concerns into a 90-minute satire with Sullivan’s Travels, Hollywood’s greatest comedy.
    • 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.
  76. Deep Red
    A great horror film about a weak man who, gazing into a vibrant pool of freshly spilled blood, learns just how little he ultimately knows.
  77. Columbus
    The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.
  78. Night of the Living Dead
    A stark, eerie and unrelenting parable of dread. There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.
  79. The Artist
    The Artist neatly sidesteps this unsolvable dilemma by ignoring everything that's fascinating and memorable about the era, focusing instead on a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn't even qualify as a roman à clef.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Foreign Correspondent
    Where the film separates itself from the director’s other early studio work and, indeed, many films of the period, is in its ambition and scope of its production. The aforementioned set pieces are not only memorable, they’re among the most impressively mounted action sequences to that point.
  81. Zama
    How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.
  82. Dead Souls
    The anguish expressed and experiences described by the survivors certainly can overlap with each other, and even become repetitive, but it’s ultimately this unification of perspective that gives Dead Souls its authority—and that allows it to become an incisive reappropriation of collectivist solidarity.
  83. Cameraperson
    Cameraperson is certainly a collection of memorable images, but it's more so Johnson's facility with narrative, on a micro and macro level, that impresses.
  84. The Mother and the Whore
    Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films.
  85. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rebel Without a Cause
    Where the attitudes of "East of Eden" are hopelessly dated and broad, the poetic longing for connection in Rebel Without a Cause will always feel timeless.
  87. The Quiet Girl
    The Quiet Girl earns its most emotionally powerful scenes because of the way that it so gracefully convinces us that it wasn’t even building toward them in the first place.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Seventh Continent (1989)
    By concentration exclusively on humanity’s negativism, Haneke proves to be as damagingly reductive of life’s possibilities as the emotional malaise he sets out to expose.
  89. Anomalisa
    The film's highpoint is one of the most remarkably moving sex scenes in all of American cinema, and the irony of it involving bland puppets is hardly lost on Kaufman and Johnson.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Conversation
    A shout-out to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America’s body politic in the era of Watergate.
  91. Show Boat
    A surprisingly nuanced, if at times woefully dated, attempt to depict the complexities of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified as the problem of the 20th century: the color line.
  92. 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.
  93. Richard III
    Donning a doozy of a puttied schnoz, a slightly exaggerated limp, and a boyish, midnight-black wig, Sir Laurence Olivier feels more at home in the eponymous role of his own adaptation of Richard III than he does in any of his other storied roles, holding and releasing the succulent prose with unerring confidence and clarity.
  94. The Lion King
    Although far from the worst offender in Disney's canon, The Lion King is nevertheless host to many of the less savory qualities common to the studio's output.
  95. Democrats
    According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.
  96. Wild Strawberries
    Initially, Wild Strawberries appears to be an almost pointedly unsubtle coming-of-age story that’s been goosed with dime-store surrealism and male handwringing masked as intellectual engagement with humankind. But the bluntness is a misdirection that underlines the depth of Bergman’s empathy with his hero as well as his dedication to his real subject, which is the process of mentally freeing oneself from an insidiously limiting self-mythology.
  97. The Seventh Seal
    The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.
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