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. Obsession
    Bujold’s enthusiasm as a performer redeems the entire picture, especially when she’s asked to perform flashback scenes that shouldn’t work, but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma’s fearlessly experimental whims.
  2. Nafi's Father
    The film vibrantly articulates all that’s lost when people are held under the draconian decree of warlords.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Love Affair
    Unlike many romantic comedies of the current age, life is decidedly not what you make of it in McCarey’s films; instead, it comes at you hard and cruel, and if you’re lucky you’ll find the right person with whom to weather the storm.
  4. Spaceship Earth
    The film offers a refuge of idealism and intellectuality in an age that’s actively hostile to both of those qualities.
  5. We Are Little Zombies
    The film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries.
  6. Lady Snowblood
    A rape-revenge narrative so streamlined that even the gimmick of its achronological editing never muddies the progression of Yuki’s journey.
  7. The Driller Killer
    What makes the film so remarkable is the extent to which Ferrara, even at the outset of his career, exploits sex and violence for their popular appeal even as he reflects on the effect of such subjects on both his own art and the culture at large.
  8. Take Me Somewhere Nice
    From beneath defensive layers of distanced comic despair emerges a sincere story about a young woman’s emotional reconciliation with her troubled place of origin.
  9. California Split
    Altman’s disgruntled comedy California Split, aside from its typically busy soundtrack (it was the first movie Altman used eight-channel audio to capture all the dialogue), seems a relatively straightforward buddy film...it’s also an anti-buddy parable in which George Segal and Elliott Gould’s homosocial behavior is equated unflatteringly against their obsessive gambling addictions.
  10. Thieves Like Us
    This isn’t simply another version of the mythologizing tactics that saw Bonnie Parker emulating the flappers from Gold Diggers of 1933 in Bonnie and Clyde. Altman refuses to romanticize his characters’ impressionable innocence, but nor is he resolute to assert cultural impregnability either. Instead, Altman’s emphasis lies in locating the specificities of historical time and understanding how socially constructed mythologies come to proliferate in the first place.
  11. Crystal Swan
    Throughout the film, it’s as if mundane objects hold the remedies for the wretchedness of everyday life.
  12. Faces
    Cassavetes didn’t improvise, and Faces was scripted, but many of the film’s scenes still have the feel of conversations happening right in front of you, with all the imperfections and digressions and looseness of the everyday.
  13. Wise Blood
    Huston’s Wise Blood is a sharp, busy canvas that, like a man with a good car, doesn’t need to be justified.
  14. The Blob
    The heroes may be teenagers, but The Blob, though generally a goofy and enjoyable B-programmer ideal for watching while loaded in the middle of the night, is still one of the most pointedly reactionary of the 1950s’ alien-invasion movies.
  15. My Brilliant Career
    If the narrative is slightly schematic in the way it sets up a binary between Harry and freedom, it’s never didactic. That’s thanks to Armstrong’s clear-eyed direction, which never feels the need to underline its points, relying on selections from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” to lend the film a mood of droll wistfulness.
  16. Now, Voyager
    Now, Voyager is the stuff of young lovers and hare-brained idealists, and if it can feel pretty foolish at times, it’s unforgettable for how sincere and affectionate it is toward one particularly time-honored cliché: that only fools falls in love.
  17. Salesman
    An immersive drama that bridges real-life details with the catharses of parables with expressionistic on-the-fly camerawork, a blend of the textural and the poetic that’s hallucinatory and profound.
  18. This Is Not a Movie
    The documentary adroitly demonstrates that Robert Fisk is still motivated by the boyish curiosity that drew him to journalism.
  19. The Audition
    With great clarity, the film conveys how discipline can be directed both inward and outward.
  20. An Angel at My Table
    Jane Campion upends staid genre convention with an impressionistic approach to character.
  21. Picture of His Life
    Amos Nachoum has a vulnerability that he manages to locate in animals without diminishing their capacity for violence.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Psychomagic, A Healing Art
    Whether or not the 91-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky makes another film, Psychomagic could easily stand as a fitting encapsulation of the themes of suffering and transcendence that have run throughout his work.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Black Is King
    Out of a dazzling fusion of the hottest trends of American R&B and Afrobeat, this visual album proposes a pan-African vision of legacy, abundance, and unity, making it Beyoncé’s most wide-reaching and ambitious effort yet.
  24. The Card Counter
    Paul Schrader’s film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present.
  25. Mildred Pierce
    Though its craft is accomplished, the film never gets deep under one’s skin the way it ought to.
  26. Au Revoir les Enfants
    Part dream, part nightmare, the film vividly remembers a traumatic moment in time that cannot be forgotten.
  27. They Live by Night
    Ray’s plaintive artistry lends this weepy noir a melancholic beauty.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Topo
    Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo remains an enduring cult-film experience.
  29. The Holy Mountain
    The Holy Mountain is nothing if not exuberant while cartwheeling its way through the cosmos and back through the non sequitur-strewn plains and deserts, towns and cities, ridges and ranges of Mexico.
  30. Song Without a Name
    The film is strikingly fixated on exploring loss and pain on an intimate and personal scale.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    It’s Sirk-on-a-shoestring, and twice as cynical.
  32. Sunless Shadows
    Redolent of Claude Lanzmann’s approach, Mehrdad Oskouei strips his images to their barest bones as his subjects openly speak about their traumas, as if trying to avoid aestheticizing their pain.
  33. Creature from the Black Lagoon
    A much more antic, exploitative experience than the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Mummy/Dracula pictures it stands alongside, Creature from the Black Lagoon perfectly typifies the transition from older, more European horror styles into bloodthirsty schlock and ever-cheaper thrills.
  34. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Shaka King’s film, anchored by two sterling lead performances, complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom.
  35. A Thousand Cuts
    The film uses endangered press freedom in the Philippines to illustrate the threat posed to liberal democracy by weaponized social media.
  36. Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
    Reiner Holzemer’s adulation of his subject feels most credible because he spends a lot of time focusing on the clothes.
  37. Alone
    John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.
  38. Pinocchio
    Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s story trembles with corporeal strangeness and unpredictability.
  39. Coup 53
    Once Taghi Amirani turns his attention to the coup itself, his film snaps into shape, with Walter Murch skillfully knitting together new and old interviews to lay out the story in highly dramatic form.
  40. Epicentro
    It alternates political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Hubert Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise.
  41. Ghost Tropic
    Bas Devos’s film is a street-lit trek through the eerily empty avenues and byways of a city at sleep.
  42. One Night in Miami
    As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.
  43. Night of the Kings
    The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.
  44. Wolfwalkers
    The storyline’s edges are frayed just enough to give it the gentle distance of a tale recalled though the gauze of myth and memory.
  45. Another Round
    Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, like The Hunt, is ultimately a parable about breaking a social contract.
  46. Enemies of the State
    The film’s concession to the fungible nature of presented reality comes across not as indecisive but courageous.
  47. Final Account
    Luke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    One of the most striking effects here occurs whenever Herzog and Oppenheimer slow down the film’s often-hectic pace to let viewers ponder the sheer beauty of the imagery, whether that’s painterly rendered details of landscape or the natural splendor of closely observed crystals and minerals.
  49. Mandibles
    The idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving.
  50. MLK/FBI
    The film refrains from any dubious moral calculations by giving King’s personal deceptions the same weight as his public morality.
  51. Shiva Baby
    Emma Seligman’s film effectively builds tension from what is a relatively familiar, low-key scenario.
  52. The Prom
    Ryan Murphy’s vibrant film adaptation makes a closer-to-seamless whole of the story’s disparate parts.
  53. Wildfire
    The structure of Wildfire’s narrative doesn’t emerge out of a simplistic progression from strife to reconciliation, as writer-director Cathy Brady has her characters follow a realistically erratic trajectory.
  54. 76 Days
    The documentary may be the defining portrait of the dawning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
  55. Tragic Jungle
    It operates in an ambiguous register, suggesting that a woman is working in unison with nature to dole out revenge for their exploitation.
  56. Beginning
    The low-key, serene natural beauty of Beginning’s setting provides a counterpoint to the often-disturbing events of the film.
  57. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    In his final role, Chadwick Boseman meticulously charts the breakdown of a man discovering, within the mirages of 1920s blackness, that pursuit and escape, fleeing from and running toward, are inextricably intertwined.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Witches
    At the center of Roeg’s stylistic excess is Houston, balancing effortlessly between high camp and horror.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sands of Iwo Jima
    Allan Dwan’s film is an intimate rendering of a monumental event, featuring John Wayne in one of his most emotionally complex roles.
  60. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    Writer-director Jim Cummings reinvigorates an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations.
  61. God Told Me To
    God Told Me To is one of the key American horror films from the 1970s to mine the internally sexual, racial quandaries of a nation beset by one great civil rights catastrophe after another.
  62. The Mummy
    The Mummy is one of Hammer’s classics, cleverly fusing the human pathos of the original Universal film with the creature-centric physicality of the sequels the latter inevitably yielded.
  63. Daughters of Darkness
    Kümel’s impulse to remain on the waning edge of eroticism turns what could’ve been another cheap thrill into a genuinely unsettling examination of the human race’s most happily sanctioned form of vampirism: man-woman couplings.
  64. 8½
    8½ works best as a self-deprecating comedy, a fact revealed most forcefully in the folly of film production on display.
  65. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    The film is affectingly poignant in its frequently uncomfortable presentation of Shane MacGowan’s physical ruination.
  66. Madre
    Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s feature-length Madre contemplates how memories of loss linger and distort the present.
  67. Zappa
    The documentary is determined not to be a typical rock-god story with predictable rise-and-fall arcs.
  68. America America
    Filmed with a cast of largely nonprofessional actors, America America immediately strives to impress its audience with the raw reality of its immigrant narrative.
  69. Alice in the Cities
    What makes Alice in the Cities so noteworthy is the tender, lifelike rapport cultivated between Vogler and Rottländer.
  70. The White Tiger
    Ramin Bahrani’s film is a turbulent and snarkily self-aware melodrama about breathless social climbing.
  71. The Killing of Two Lovers
    The film’s cramped compositions hauntingly underline the claustrophobic nature of its protagonist’s life.
  72. Coded Bias
    The documentary dives down the rabbit hole to chillingly, comprehensively expose how algorithms can perpetuate bias in often unforeseen and unjust ways.
  73. Hunter Hunter
    Writer-director Shawn Linden skillfully draws us into the narrative before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety.
  74. The Offence
    Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).
  75. Let Them All Talk
    Steven Soderbergh’s signature formal gamesmanship enlivens what could have been a stodgy scenario.
  76. The Dig
    The Dig clearly relishes in having found so many fascinating real people arriving at one place at once.
  77. Fantastic Planet
    Fantastic Planet’s blend of straightforward, almost elementary storytelling (any missing context is filled in via a voiceover by Jean Valmont as the adult Terr) with heady themes and eroticized imagery marks the film as a relic of an era with much looser standards around the dichotomy of the children’s film and the adult drama.
  78. Black Mama White Mama
    Black Mama, White Mama became a key reference point for postmodern mash-up artists like Quentin Tarantino and Neveldine/Taylor, but the film’s socio-political jungle is not all fun-and-grindhouse games.
  79. The Reason I Jump
    The film weaves together the stories of five mostly nonverbal autistic teens to present a rich tapestry of the autistic experience.
  80. Blizzard of Souls
    The filmmakers are unafraid of the picturesque, lighting scenes so they resemble old-master canvases.
  81. A Glitch in the Matrix
    Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.
  82. Beautiful Something Left Behind
    Katrine Philp’s documentary boldly argues for a clear-eyed frankness in talking to bereaved children about loss.
  83. Film About a Father Who
    Throughout, Lynne Sachs undercuts the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.
  84. PVT Chat
    Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.
  85. Bad Tales
    Narration, as the film reminds us, isn’t only a diversion but a form of authority, of power, and when authority is least conspicuous, it’s often at its most insidious.
  86. Captain Blood
    Errol Flynn’s wicked, wicked charm helps keep this high seas adventure afloat.
  87. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    Questlove’s Summer of Soul is as much an essential music documentary as it is a public service.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Scum
    One of director Alan Clarke’s most uncompromising docudramas.
  89. Passing
    A sickened rage and psychological nuance courses through every meticulously arranged frame of the film.
  90. Pleasure
    The film fiercely homes in at the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.
  91. The Sparks Brothers
    The film embodies the idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of Ron and Russell Mael’s long-running cult American pop band.
  92. Strawberry Mansion
    Strawberry Mansion playfully and delightfully draws parallels between the creative agency of dreams and the waking creativity of filmmaking.
  93. We're All Going to the World's Fair
    Throughout, Jane Schoenbrun reveals themself to be adroitly plugged into both the current technological and sociological landscape.
  94. The Wanting Mare
    It’s as if Nicholas Ashe Bateman is commenting on a distinctly American suburban malaise, using a fictional place, digitally made, to get at a real, painful truth about being stuck in a place you didn’t choose, amid circumstances you didn’t create.
  95. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    It’s a giddy, diabolical, and terminally underappreciated sequel to the film that made Joe Dante’s career.
  96. Test Pattern
    The film strikingly punctuates the detachment of realist drama with the expressionism of psychological horror.
  97. Sin
    Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil.
  98. My Darling Supermarket
    If the world outside the Supermercado Veran is rife with poverty and crime, we wouldn’t know it from inside this little cocoon.
  99. Enforcement
    The film is both a lurid urban thriller and an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.
  100. Hope
    Maria Sødahl’s considers the extreme emotions provoked by a medical emergency with an impressive force of clarity.
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