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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    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Secret Admirer
    It’s relatively good. Of course, “relatively good” in the mid-‘80s teen-movie genre often means “not unwatchable,” and Secret Admirer doesn’t quite qualify as fresh or unpredictable...But it also has a handful of gratifying moments and nuances you don’t expect from the genre, starting with girls who eat and curse like boys.
  2. Mutiny on the Bounty
    For Lloyd, Thalberg, and the writers, the point of the film was to tell a compelling story and, like the Bounty’s inebriated physician creating various tall tales to explain his wooden leg, facts and meanings ultimately just got in their way of crafting a great entertainment.
  3. The Border
    The Border is marvelously detailed. The script, by Deric Washburn, Walon Green, David Freeman, is peppered with lively obscenities and slights that communicate the debauched cynicism of this world.
  4. Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is the type of movie that you would want to watch through the slits in a sewer grate, only its execution sits perched well above its scummy aim, and the end result is that you feel guilty for wishing for something more perverted.
  5. 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.
  6. Splendor in the Grass
    Inge’s scenario unravels alarmingly once the two would-be lovers start to drift apart thanks to Deanie’s nervous breakdown and the simultaneous (almost psychically connected) market crash of 1929, but the first half of the film is a tour de force of deferred urges, contortion acts of awkward intimacy, and the thrill of adolescence.
  7. Color Out of Space
    The film is a vivid depiction of how a confrontation with the unknown can so easily shatter the fragile bonds that hold us together.
  8. Babyteeth
    It incorporates addiction, age-inappropriate romance, mental illness, and terminal disease into its plot without collapsing into a movie-of-the-week black hole.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Naked Prey
    A purified chase film, Naked Prey nevertheless is at its most affecting in the childlike scenes between the main character and a young native girl (played by Bella Randles) he befriends along the way.
  10. Gretel & Hansel
    Beginning with the reversed names in its title, the film announces itself as a distinctly feminine spin on the Grimm fairy tale.
  11. The Vigil
    Keith Thomas’s film hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth.
  12. Mister America
    What’s so fascinating about the world of On Cinema is the way each creative outgrowth expands and deepens the lore, and Mister America’s universe-specific innovations renders the film indispensable in context.
  13. I Lost My Body
    It focuses equally on moments of shared connection and incidental loss until the two feel indistinguishable.
  14. Klaus
    Sergio Pablos’s film is essentially a metaphor for its own unique and refreshing mode of expression.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Frenzy
    With a very strong cast and sharp dialogue by Anthony Shaffer, Frenzy is easily the strongest of the master’s final works.
  16. The Lair of the White Worm
    Cheap effects and gratuitous displays of nudity only heighten the film’s delirious demeanor.
  17. The Dead Center
    The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.
  18. 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.
  19. Ága
    Milko Lazarov seems driven to record the inner workings of a singular slice of Inuit culture before it goes the way of the reindeer.
  20. The Miracle of the Little Prince
    In a world increasingly resistant to cultural exchange, the miracle of The Little Prince is how it’s become so universally beloved, and Boonstra’s film is a worthy homage to its passionate translators who’ve been so inspired by Saint-Exupery’s story .
  21. An Officer and a Spy
    The sum of its aesthetics, as in The Pianist, feels at once like a gritty window into history as it was and a haunting amber-trapped essence of the feeling of an age.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    Remembered mainly as the neophyte Pacino’s launching pad into Godfather stardom, the modestly scaled, harrowing Panic in Needle Park has over the decades proven to be nearly as influential as Coppola’s blockbuster, setting a cinematic template later used by Drugstore Cowboy, Requiem for a Dream, and a good deal of Sundance Channel fodder.
  23. The Assistant
    With The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate.
  24. Shadows
    At 80 minutes, its cinematic flash fiction, and a suitable entry point into the lively body of work Cassavetes made.
  25. The Magician
    This piquant control over cinematic grammar doesn’t quite rescue the film from a laughably zombie-tinged climax and an anomalous deus ex machina denouement, but it makes The Magician one of Bergman’s more accessible failures, and collapses any suspicious connection between him and the fretful Vogler.
  26. The Cave
    Its depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after The Cave’s doctors have left Ghouta.
  27. Anne at 13,000 ft
    The film intimately immerses us in the psyche of a woman for whom each day is a minefield of uncomfortable interactions.
  28. Sound of Metal
    Darius Marder’s film captures, with urgency and tenderness, just how enticing the residue of the past can be.
  29. Dream Horse
    After watching this Welsh racehorse drama, even those of us who’d struggle to pronounce the word may find ourselves feeling a bit of hwyl.
  30. The French Dispatch
    Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.
  31. 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.
  32. The Disappearance of My Mother
    It’s fascinating to see Benedetta Barzini in academic action, like an ethnographer of the patriarchy herself, bringing back news from its most glamourous yet rotten core.
  33. Sometimes Always Never
    The film unites its seemingly disparate strands of somber drama and deadpan comedy into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
  34. Celebration
    Olivier Meyrou’s ironically titled documentary weaves a tightly constructed story about success, power, and mortality.
  35. Redoubt
    Matthew Barney re-instills nature with some of the mystic aura that modernity, with its technologies and techniques of knowledge, has robbed it of.
  36. When Lambs Become Lions
    Think Michael Mann’s Heat but in East Africa and with real-world stakes.
  37. Betty Blue
    If only Beineix could have imagined an existence for his star-crossed protagonists beyond the source material (the question of whether successful maternity would have sobered Betty yelps for an impossible sequel), he may have managed a sultry masterpiece.
  38. Duet for Cannibals
    Susan Sontag’s debut film serves as an intriguing cinematic extension of her more well-known written work.
  39. Candyman
    Rose’s dizzy, Jungle Fever-ish romanticism is juxtaposed against his cold, Cronenbergian dystopia to create Candyman‘s uniquely baroque use of modern urban blight, subtle political undercurrents, and hints of fallen woman melodrama. It creates a startlingly effective shocker that gains power upon further, sleepless-night reflection.
  40. I See You
    The film’s tone is extremely eerie, with creeping camera movements, striking imagery, abrupt edits, and a delicately sinister score.
  41. Antebellum
    This is a film that employs imaginative twists to illuminate the racism that’s entrenched in American history and society.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Call of the Wild
    The film’s avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism and by its deepening of the man-dog bond that forms the heart of London’s story.
  43. Emma.
    This lively adaptation plays up the novel’s more farcical elements, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.
  44. Feast of the Epiphany
    Its sensitivity to how something as seemingly ordinary as food can have an immense emotional impact is consistently and unobtrusively profound.
  45. Incitement
    Admirably, Yaron Zilberman’s film focuses on the cyclical nature of violence in a decades-old conflict.
  46. Promising Young Woman
    The film’s empowerment fantasy of a woman who steamrolls male egos is as stylish and fun as its portrait of gender relations is dire.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Brewster McCloud
    What saves the film from curdled, wise-ass whimsy is the control Altman brings to the freewheeling material, to say nothing of the undercurrent of despair that keeps its absurdism bold and beguiling.
  48. Empty Metal
    The film is greater in its confrontational force than the sum of a dozen festival breakthroughs lauded for their fearlessness.
  49. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    The film is well-outfitted with telling, thematically rich shards of historical information.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The American Friend
    From its engagement with genre tropes (particularly film noir), to its tangibly grimy urban backdrops, to its archetypal hero/villain dramatic dichotomy, there’s no mistaking the film’s American influence.
  51. Crimes of Passion
    Russell’s wild style and shameless exhibitionism places it on a par with the contemporary work of Brian De Palma in terms of its vicious satire of ‘80s kitsch and repression.
  52. The Vast of Night
    Director AndrePatterson never breaks the film's incantatory spell with pointless freneticism, patiently savoring the great thrill of genre stories: anticipation.
  53. Acasă, My Home
    The film is at its most moving when it lingers on the face of children who are impotent to return to the world they used to call home.
  54. Inferno
    Dario Argento undervalues his material, but his set pieces are glorious enough that the film’s plot contrivances can be forgiven.
  55. Corpus Christi
    It’s within the murky realm of self-doubt and spiritual anxiety that it’s at its most audacious and compelling.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    And Then We Danced
    Levan Akin offers up a swooning gay romance as the centerpiece from which all of his other ideas radiate.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Zombie
    Taken on its own terms, it works quite agreeably as a visceral blow to the breadbasket, with one of the most outrageous and apocalyptic final scenes in the entirety of the subgenre.
  58. Dick Tracy
    A highly impressive effort.
  59. Suburbia
    In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.
  60. The Amusement Park
    With The Amusement Park, George Romero holds a cracked (funhouse) mirror up to a callous and ultimately terrified society.
  61. Candyman
    Candyman doesn’t merely note the connection between fear and remembrance, it also interrogates it from every possible angle.
  62. Mank
    The film's most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.
  63. Shirley
    Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.
  64. Palm Springs
    The film smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle.
  65. Possessor Uncut
    Though Possessor favors nihilist spectacle to existentialism, Brandon Cronenberg is more interested in exploring emotional dislocation than Christopher Nolan.
  66. The Night House
    The film upends the clichés that practically define the ghost story in surprising and intriguing ways.
  67. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.
  68. Kajillionaire
    The precarity and itinerant lifestyle of the central figures in Kajillionaire can be seen as a logical next step in Miranda July’s filmmaking trajectory.
  69. On the Record
    Russell Simmons’ victims’ sense of their own complex relations to historical power structures emerges from the film’s lucid recounting of the sexual assault allegations against him.
  70. The Painter and the Thief
    Throughout the documentary, Benjamin Ree upsets conventions, offering a moving portrait of two lost souls.
  71. Cuties
    Maïmouna Doucouré has a remarkable grasp of the irrationality and volatility of middle-school social dynamics.
  72. Black Bear
    Shot through with darkly existentialist humor, the film finds Aubrey Plaza throwing a gauntlet to filmmakers who have typecast her in the past.
  73. Cane River
    The film’s awkwardness is expressive of the pain and confusion of wrestling with truths that shake one’s conception of identity.
  74. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    Radha’s remaking of herself contains an uplifting, unpretentious truth about aging: It’s never too late to make a new start.
  75. Boys State
    The film suggests that our political system is a popularity contest that functions for no one but those jockeying for power.
  76. Welcome to Chechnya
    David France’s most remarkable accomplishment emerges from an aesthetic commitment of a very particular kind.
  77. His House
    Throughout, Remi Weekes forcefully, resonantly ties the film’s terror to the inner turmoil of his characters.
  78. Heimat is a Space in Time
    Thomas Heise’s documentary seeks to excavate real human thought and feeling beneath the haze of larger political structures.
  79. The Father
    The film approximates the dislocation of its main character’s mind with a frighteningly slippery ease.
  80. The Glorias
    The film weaves its refreshingly unpredictable web as the strands of Steinem’s life spiral around each other through snippets of scenes that work efficiently and never preachily.
  81. Tesla
    A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.
  82. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    Throughout the film, the quick-hit jokes from the show’s rich cast of oddballs serves to suggest a vibrant world outside of the Belchers.
  83. Happiest Season
    The film translates the often difficult realities of a specific kind of marginalized love into a story with broad appeal.
  84. Benedetta
    Throughout Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven builds up a heady, campy mix of religious imagery, corporeal abjectness, and masochism.
  85. My Life as a Dog
    My Life as a Dog and its sublime vision of childhood will always be there to remind us of the filmmaker Hallström once was, and potentially could be again.
  86. Funny Face
    Tim Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments can shape its inhabitants.
  87. Kill It and Leave This Town
    Mariusz Wilczyński’s animation style strikes an unlikely balance between the childlike and the proficient.
  88. Last and First Men
    The push and pull between gradual buildup and apocalyptic rupture allows the film to infiltrate the mind and recalibrate our sensitivity to time.
  89. Mogul Mowgli
    The film’s poignancy derives from its profound understanding of its main character’s identity crisis.
  90. The Woman Who Ran
    Hong Sang-soo invests the ironic, despairing theme of the film with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life.
  91. Undine
    The film questions the fixed nature of human behavior in a world whose borders are constantly shifting.
  92. Siberia
    Abel Ferrara doesn’t require traditional dream logic, as his grasp of the nitty-gritty quotidian of longing is inherently uncanny.
  93. Charlatan
    Throughout the film, Agnieszka Holland makes clear that she isn’t interested in easily digestible pop-psychology nuggets.
  94. Invaders from Mars
    Committed horror nerds and conspiracy-minded liberals alike will find fleeting suggestions of the canny parable that nearly manages to surface.
  95. The Trip to Greece
    The series’s ambient preoccupation with death is foregrounded more than ever before with this film’s main dramatic subplot.
  96. The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs
    The film speaks lyrically to a peoples’ determination to find a meaningful way to live in a rapidly changing modern world.
  97. Atlantis
    The film’s use of scale to drive home the absurdity of its characters’ actions sometimes calls to mind Werner Herzog’s tragicomic existentialism, as well as early silent cinema.
  98. Selah and The Spades
    Through its exploration of Selah’s complexities, as well as the bravado and posturing that comes with being a credible drug dealer, Selah and the Spades locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image.
  99. The Carnivores
    The characters don’t exist solely to affirm the film’s various themes, and as a result, their humanity gets under your skin.
  100. I Wanna Hold Your Hand
    Everything in I Wanna Hold Your Hand is pushed right up to the breaking point of absurdity. The lunacy of pop-culture infatuation is lent the undying fervor of a fever dream.
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