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. Knives Out
    The actors’ hammy performances only compound the amusement of watching a dynasty propped up by largesse fall to pieces at the very thought of actually having to earn their way in life.
  2. The Hole in the Ground
    The film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext.
  3. The Batman
    The film stands apart for thoughtfully suggesting that Batman might actually one day make Gotham a better place, and not merely a safer one
  4. The Suicide Squad
    Throughout the film, James Gunn renders the half-grim, half-absurdist nature of the Suicide Squad with delightfully bloody abandon.
  5. Clemency
    Chinonye Chukwu’s film is a morality play with a true sense of contradiction and melancholia.
  6. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    The film is about a mystery that isn’t solved, and how that inconclusiveness spotlights the insidious functions of society.
  7. The Death of Dick Long
    Daniel Scheinert’s film finds a very human vulnerability lurking beneath the strange and oafish behaviors of its male characters.
  8. Honey Boy
    In Alma Har’el’s film, Shia LaBeouf’s plays an avatar of his father as an expressionistic act of self-therapy.
  9. Knock Down the House
    Rachel Lears’s film is a rebuttal to the position that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's election victory was an incidental event in American politics.
  10. Light From Light
    Only in focusing so thoroughly on the normal does Paul Harrill’s film stumble upon the paranormal.
  11. Luce
    On the whole, the film is an unvarnished reflection of the ugliness of American attitudes toward assimilation.
  12. Midnight Family
    It’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power.
  13. The Brink
    Alison Klayman’s fly-on-the-wall documentary cuts Trump’s Rasputin down to size but doesn’t completely dismiss his power.
  14. The Italian Job
    The Italian Job isn’t the first movie to take car chases into strange and new environments, but it sure is creative.
  15. One Child Nation
    Rich in intimate detail, the film attains a more epic power as it burrows deeper into the effects of China’s one-child policy.
  16. The Gospel of Eureka
    The documentary is uniquely attuned to the fickle whims of history, politics, and biographical circumstance.
  17. Giant Little Ones
    Keith Behrman’s film comprehends the malleable, often inscrutable nature of desire.
  18. The King of Staten Island
    Throughout, Judd Apatow dramatizes the ideal of community with an almost Eastwoodian sense of rapture.
  19. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    The film is a showcase for preposterous (and mostly practical) action and an unabashed sentimentality that Ethan feels for the makeshift family of spies he’s assembled over the course of the series.
  20. Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is the rare exploitation film whose few redeeming qualities make up for its numerous shortcomings.
  21. The Driver
    A visceral symphony of screeching tires and crushing metal.
  22. Two-Lane Blacktop
    America exploded in the ’60s; Two-Lane Blacktop is the post-apocalyptic road trip.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Burning
    Notable mostly for its prime-era Savini bloodshed and a few quick glimpses of a young Holly Hunter (uttering about as many lines of dialogue as won her an Oscar a dozen years later for The Piano), returning to The Burning three decades later is like contemplating any summer at camp: Peel away your nostalgia, and you’ll be left with 20-second sex bouts and insect bites.
  24. The Competition
    Claire Simon knows that the best way to capture the anxiousness of a moment is to leave it unembellished.
  25. Driveways
    The film’s devotion to the belief that kindness can be a balm for almost any hurt is deeply moving.
  26. I Was at Home, But
    Angela Schanalec’s film configures itself most potently in hindsight as a punch to the gut.
  27. Cutter's Way
    One of the final triumphs of the New Hollywood era, Cutter’s Way belongs on the shelf of fans of both Cassavetian hyperreal melodrama and Pakula-esque political thrillers.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Police Story (1985)
    Like many of the most compelling martial-arts movies, the Police Story films more closely resembles a dance picture than any kind of action blockbuster, with meticulously choreographed fight sequences standing in for fan-baiting musical numbers.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Police Story 2 (1988)
    Though ostensibly sub-Hitchcockian wrong-man mysteries, with a liberal serving of cop-drama clichés rounding out the narrative framework, the films are better enjoyed as purely cinematic catalogues of set pieces and sight gags, spectacles of breathless physical excess.
  30. Booksmart
    It's an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls’ experiences without sacrificing grossness, and that you can be gross without being too mean.
  31. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    In this time of peril and chaos, Elizabeth Carroll’s documentary is a balm for the soul.
  32. The Juniper Tree
    The Juniper Tree’s peculiar pedigree as an American indie fueled by European arthouse tropes and constructed with a flair for the avant-garde and the handmade marks it as a welcome rediscovery.
  33. MS Slavic 7
    In its balance of a wispy narrative and long, quiet episodes of textual close reading, the film feels incomplete in a productive way.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Manta Ray
    Manta Ray functions as an oblique portrait of writer-director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s anger about the Rohingya refugee crisis in Thailand.
  35. Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes
    The documentary proves that the history and mythology of American jazz is as intoxicating as the music itself.
  36. The Chambermaid
    Lila Avilés’s film reserves the possibility of flirtations with disaster to turn into acts of emancipation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Dorado
    Pangs of déjà vu might strike while watching El Dorado, as it’s a thinly-veiled remake of an earlier John Wayne film directed by Howard Hawks and co-written by Leigh Brackett for Warner Bros., 1959’s Rio Bravo. Though the stories are similar, El Dorado feels sharper, bolstered by Harold Rosson’s brilliant photography with scenes seemingly painted on celluloid.
  38. Wild Rose
    Tom Harper’s film empathetically probes the growing pains of self-improvement.
  39. Blow the Man Down
    Without Margo Martindale, the film would be a sharp and tightly constructed nautical noir. With her, it becomes a memorable one.
  40. Clementine
    There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout Lara Jean Gallagher’s film.
  41. Come to Daddy
    Unlike many [M. Night] Shyamalan films, which seem constructed out of Mad Libs, Come to Daddy retains an emotional consistency.
  42. Low Tide
    Kevin McMullin displays a piercing awareness of the tensions that drive the dynamics of adolescent outsiders.
  43. Swallow
    Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.
  44. Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation
    Throughout, the era-defining yet problem-plagued music festival astounds in large part for all the disasters that didn’t occur.
  45. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Martin Scorsese culls various images together to offer a startlingly intense vision of America as place that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, essentially believes in nothing, following one demoralizing crisis after another.
  46. Meeting Gorbachev
    Werner Herzog’s documentary is a rare example of the arch ironist’s capacity to be awed not by nature but by man.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Decade of Fire
    Decade of Fire’s purpose is to make known how those in the Bronx must continue to fight even today against forces hellbent on their erasure.
  48. The Projectionist
    Where The Projectionist ultimately excels ... is as the kind of cultural microcosm that makes Ferrara’s other documentaries feel at once urgent and incredibly rich in their broader implications.
  49. House of Hummingbird
    The film is never more intense than when it’s finding parallels between its main character’s anomie and Korea’s dehumanizing expansion.
  50. The Silence of Others
    Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s documentary is monumental for its clamorous sounding of an alarm.
  51. Zulu
    A good platter for a great, underappreciated classic of British cinema (under the direction of American expatriate Cy Endfield)—light on supplements but strong in presentation.
  52. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    In verbally recounting her history, Morrison proves almost as engaging as she in print, a wise and sensitive voice.
  53. Charade
    Shot by Charles Lang, one of the greatest American cinematographers to ever live, Charade is some sort of miraculous entertainment, self-aware and self-parodying yet never distancing or detached. Hepburn is the audience’s funny and flighty proxy, allowing us the great pleasure of being seduced by Grant’s unpredictable charmer.
  54. Bacurau
    The film succeeds as a stingingly personal missive aimed squarely at Brazil’s right-wing president.
  55. Little Joe
    Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence.
  56. Les Misérables
    The film serves as both caustic update to Victor Hugo’s monolithic novel and cautionary tale about the future.
  57. Oh Mercy!
    Arnaud Desplechin evinces a glancing touch with showing how social tension and need inform law and crime.
  58. Parasite
    The only thing that keeps Parasite just slightly below the tier of Bong’s best work, namely The Host and his underrated and similarly themed 2000 debut film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is the overstuffed pile-up of incident that occurs toward the end.
  59. Sibyl
    Justine Triet is less committed to some make-believe realism than she is to the tricks that memory and language can play on us.
  60. The Whistlers
    Corneliu Porumboiu’s film is very much a genre exercise, and a particularly Soderberghian one at that.
  61. Beanpole
    Kantemir Balagov depicts pain in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of coping and collapse with delicate subtlety.
  62. Liberté
    Though betraying the markings of its original form in its small revolving ensemble, single location, and frequent tableau staging, Liberté conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that’s unique to the language of cinema.
  63. Fire Will Come
    The film is much more in synchrony with the haziness of its imagery when it preserves the awkwardness between characters, the impossibility for anything other than life’s basic staples to be exchanged.
  64. The Climb
    The film slides seamlessly between empathizing with its clueless bros and making them objects of unsparing derision.
  65. Deerskin
    In Deerskin, Quentin Dupieux mines the absurdism that is his signature with newfound forcefulness.
  66. The Lighthouse
    Robert Eggers loosens the noose of veracity that choked his meticulously researched but painfully self-serious debut just enough to allow for so much absurdism to peek through.
  67. First Love
    First Love reveals itself to be an elegant and haunting Takashi Miike film in throwaway clothing.
  68. Tommaso
    Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.
  69. Family Romance, LLC
    We are never quite sure of the extent to which situations and dialogues have been scripted and, as such, it’s as though Herzog were more witness than author, more passerby than gawker, simply registering Japan being Japan.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harakiri
    Structured with intricacy and precision, the storyline alternates between present and past, using its extended flashback sequences to delay and then detonate narrative revelations like so many time bombs.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    That undeniable off-screen friction only helps grease the wheels of the film’s compulsive forward momentum, supplying a crackling energy to scenes wherein, among other gothic horrors, pet birds are served up for supper with relish.
  72. 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.
  73. 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.
  74. Mike Wallace Is Here
    Much like its subject, Avi Belkin’s documentary knows how to start an argument.
  75. Sea of Shadows
    Richard Ladkani’s Sea of Shadows, which bristles with drama and a panicky sense of righteous anger, uses the potential extinction of one little-known species of whale to symbolize a far larger and potentially globe-spanning problem.
  76. The Raft
    The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.
  77. Jawline
    The film is refreshing for its lack of pearl-clutching, its ambivalence in assessing what it’s like to be a commodity with a will and a nervous system.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Cid
    There’s no denying El Cid‘s lucid grandeur as it reaches its famous climax, a simultaneously triumphant and tragic portrait of the warrior as corpse that, like the best of Mann’s work, never neglects the human toll of heroism.
  79. A Bigger Splash
    Jack Hazan’s portrait of David Hockney stands between documentary and fictional film, reality and fantasy.
  80. The Queen
    A quaint portrait it’s not, and aside from the conditions of the rat-trap midtown hotel where the competing queens are put up in, it’s hardly fly-on-the-wall either. While it presents its subjects at arm’s length, The Queen consistently recognizes the constraints they face.
  81. Jay Myself
    Jay Maisel’s former home suggests a bastion of creativity in a neighborhood whose rough edges have been completely sanded down.
  82. Freaks
    Today, hardcore fans have a way of trivializing the film’s moral significance, some calling it a mere “masterpiece of shock cinema.” This is to seriously underplay the film’s blistering humanity and the audacious aesthetic and philosophical lengths to which Browning goes to challenge the way we define beauty and abnormality.
  83. Rojo
    It masterfully sustains a sense of “wrongness” that will be felt even by those unfamiliar with Argentina’s history.
  84. Gloria
    Cassavetes and Rowlands lend a screwball energy to this thriller, ably playing conflicting moods of suspense and silliness off each other to complicate an otherwise straightforward genre film.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    Director Norman Jewison’s Rollerball remains a poignant and unusually prescient vision of our world as defined by Walmart and Exxon-Mobil.
  86. My Dinner with Andre
    The fact that people don’t talk like this in real life isn’t a flaw in the film: It’s a tragic social deficiency.
  87. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    It’s not hard to parallel David/Dickens’s head-spinningly intricate descriptors with Iannucci’s own prodding, poetically vulgar rhetoric.
  88. Hustlers
    The film is remarkable for capturing a brewing conflict between women while also celebrating their connection.
  89. Walkabout
    Roeg shoots every figure in the film like an instructional visual subject, and it levels the philosophical playing field—whether man, or ant, or echidna, or gnarled tree stump, they’re all fodder for the experimental interplay of light, shadow, and space.
  90. Aquarela
    At heart, Victor Kossakovsky's Aquarela is a war film: a cacophonous survey of the global battle between man and water.
  91. End of the Century
    Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.
  92. Marriage Story
    Throughout, the subtle glimpses of a couple’s lingering affection for one another complicate the bitterness of their separation.
  93. The Last Duel
    Ridley Scott’s medieval saga insightfully revels in the complexities of its competing storylines.
  94. Bad Education
    Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.
  95. The Burnt Orange Heresy
    The film allows that we are complicit in privilege for our fascination and envy.
  96. Los Reyes
    The film is a quietly radical attempt to view the world from a non-human perspective.
  97. Genèse (Genesis)
    Lesage pulls focus onto the aftershocks of trauma rather than the traumatic events themselves.
  98. Greener Grass
    In the film’s world, there can be no real resistance, as the suburbs have already won.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Duellists
    The Duellists explores its own unique thematic terrain and limns its characters’ psychology with a perspicacity that’s all its own.
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