Slant Magazine's Scores

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:
7775 movie reviews
  1. The film suggests a fusion of an eco-doc and acid western, and this disparity between genres results in a mysterious tension.
  2. The film offers a glimpse of a world where screens are pores in the boundary between dreams and waking life.
  3. Violation impressively pushes against the typically straightforward trajectory of the rape-revenge film.
  4. In the film, Manaus is a place of irreconcilable tension between the lush natural world and the cold, metallic world of industrial modernity.
  5. The film’s throwback nature is in sync with Ephraim Asili’s interest in wanting to keep the legacy of black activism alive.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes posited voyeuristic spectacle as the essence of cinema in Rear Window; in To Catch a Thief they validate their thesis with plenty of spectacle to be voyeuristic over.
  6. Alonso Ruizpalacios voices a profound sense of powerlessness on the part of the police without sentimentalizing the abuses and biases of the profession.
  7. The disconnect between the realities of different generations of gay men is one of Swan Song’s most unexpectedly joyful through lines.
  8. Underneath the film’s seeming casualness is an astute portrait of alcoholism, as well as a knowing glimpse of how micro tensions affect macro power plays, from pissing contests between men to sexual violations.
  9. The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.
  10. The film synthesizes the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion with the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale.
  11. To see the old-timers pass the torch to their acolytes cements the improbable importance of Jackass in American pop culture.
  12. Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary is a spry and inventive account of extraordinary transcendence.
  13. Throughout her directorial debut, Suzanne Lindon paints a concise and truthful portrait of her protagonist’s feelings of estrangement.
  14. Much of the film’s power comes from a series of deft, often wry juxtapositions between video and audio.
  15. While Ulrike Ottinger accesses the most consequential of decades through nostalgia, she does so with humility.
  16. Lois Patiño’s Red Moon Tide is a work of unmistakable horror, one predicated on such ineffable dread that the impact of climate change becomes a sort of Lovecraftian force.
  17. The documentary’s aesthetics strikingly channel the euphoric feelings induced by Ethopia’s top cash crop.
  18. The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.
  19. With its elegantly restrained cinematography, exquisitely understated performances, and quietly sumptuous production design, Azor embodies the same well-mannered urbanity as its protagonist.
  20. The film, lacking in conflict and danger, is guided by the poignant belief that there’s no end to the world.
  21. The film is a demonstrative examination of the way our raising of heroes onto social media pedestals diminishes the messy, sometimes impenetrable truth of human lives.
  22. Produced in England in 1934, The Man Who Knew Too Much was perhaps the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s films to openly attempt the autonomously cinematic, aggressively syntactic perfection with which he would later become synonymous.
  23. It’s thanks to a kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment.
  24. The film navigates a tricky space between pathos and absurdity and often turns on a dime from one to the other.
  25. La Piscine is, more than anything else, a work of vivid sensory delights.
  26. Romeo Is Bleeding projects an aura of obsessive self-consciousness that occasionally suggests the superior film that eluded its creators.
  27. With One Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh mixes an old-school 1950s noir with a modern sense of social self-consciousness.
  28. It’s Morgan Neville’s impression of Bourdain as a time bomb existing in plain sight that allows Roadrunner to be more than a greatest-hits rundown of the man’s life.
  29. John Maggio’s documentary is workmanlike in presentation but scintillating in its content.
  30. The film is a j’accuse aimed at those complicit in oppressing the most vulnerable in order to protect the powerful.
  31. The film’s fanciful archival montages shrewdly demonstrate the ways in which memory and art seamlessly combine to document reality.
  32. The film reveals Kôji Fukada to be playing a patient, very resonant long game, underscoring the struggle to wrest oneself out of social vices.
  33. The film brings us somewhere where we aren’t, and probably could not be, but nevertheless feels tangibly real.
  34. A prisoner-of-war drama as fever dream, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements: in performance, pop-star charisma versus British actorliness; in narrative style, genre expectations coming up against modernist psychosexual undercurrents.
  35. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a film that feels ripped right out of a high school art-class notebook, and sounds like a Twitch stream.
  36. These shorts capture everything from how fear of the unknown can rewire relationships to the natural world exerts its pull on us all.
  37. Cow
    Throughout Andrea Arnold’s film, a kind of affective connection is formed between animal and the cinematic apparatus.
  38. Titane wildly expands on Julia Ducournau’s idiosyncratic interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration.
  39. The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility.
  40. The film never sacrifices its ambiguity as it brings various threads about ghosts, relationships, art, and gender to a head.
  41. The material realities of being a woman in Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film.
  42. For all of the film’s visually striking action and musical set pieces, it’s the generosity of spirit with which it approaches the modern teenage experience that’s its most impressive attribute.
  43. The film unfolds at a pace that is unhurried yet self-assured, submerged in the rhythms that govern its characters’ lives.
  44. Rather than clarifying, De Palma’s technique with Raising Cain effectively obliterates the audience’s bearings. Which gives the film’s final sequence—on the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento’s killer reveal at the climax of Tenebre—a nasty twist.
  45. Arie and Chuko Esiri’s film is understated in its attunement to the challenges of trying to escape a stagnant existence.
  46. The film’s terseness could make it too cryptic for some, but that doesn’t blunt the impact of its most visceral or tender moments.
  47. Through it all Sembène maintains a steady, humanist touch.
  48. David Leitch’s film pulls off the notable feat of making human beings out of cartoonishly violent psychopaths.
  49. The functional plot and Gordon’s non-flashy directorial style aren’t what make From Beyond such a memorable cult item; as with Re-Animator, it’s more the audacity of staging elaborate sequences that mix up steamy sexual proclivities and monster madness.
  50. The sizzle of the bon mot-tossing ensemble, intact from the stage original, is bracing and fuels the film’s momentum, along with Crowley’s lacerating dialogue.
  51. Pig
    Nicolas Cage, in full martyr mode here, seems to get off on the perversity of, well, caging his brand of operatic hysteria.
  52. There’s a haunting beauty to Tatiana Huezo’s depiction of the gradual cross-contamination of childhood innocence and criminal aggression.
  53. The film accomplishes a restoration of sorts, allowing us to see how historical objects can confer meaning on a new context.
  54. This gnarly gem of 1980s-era punk horror still looks and sounds a little rough, but the film and the supplements justify the plunge.
  55. The films collected in A New Generation speak for themselves even when they don’t necessarily slot neatly into Mark Cousins’s curlicue thinking.
  56. Implicit in the film’s bleak but sympathetic portrait of a disturbed and shunned young man is that sometimes it takes a village to make a monster.
  57. At its most accomplished, the film unfolds with a voluptuous slowness and a sense that narrative endpoints are irrelevant.
  58. Juho Kuosmanen’s film interestingly thrives off of an ironic juxtaposition of character and environment.
  59. Even when the film becomes something like a spy thriller, it never loses sight of its political themes.
  60. Merciless but affecting, Vortex suggests that one respite from the loneliness of life lived in the shadow of death is the realm of dreams.
  61. Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman’s body.
  62. Hondo is a mash of the usual tropes, a whirlwind of Native American war paint, cavalry stripes, a sawdust-saloon poker game, a few fistfights, plenty of gunfire, and every moral equation coming to a satisfactory balance by the time the credits roll.
  63. One Second is as much a tribute to the struggles of a man whose life has stolen from him as it is to a bygone way of looking at movies.
  64. Maybe because How Green Was My Valley doesn’t delve as deeply into the heart of darkness as Ford did in his earlier The Grapes of Wrath, it remains one of his most curiously underrated films.
  65. The film’s fantastical meta-commentaries don’t completely cohere but have a winning go-for-it audaciousness.
  66. Lucy Walker’s absorbing study of California’s 2018 wildfires consistently goes in illuminating and surprising directions.
  67. This period drama manages the difficult task of speaking to our current moment without being didactic or preachy.
  68. Official Competition is another film about filmmaking, but it escapes hermeticism by homing in on actors and acting.
  69. Pablo Larraín’s film readily conjures a paranoia-suffused atmosphere of fear for what might happen at any moment.
  70. The film metatextually insists that we not be taken in by new, more sophisticated methods of obfuscation.
  71. Mazursky finds the politics in the wrinkles of human behavior, rather than contriving behavior to suit his politics.
  72. With its pulpy thrills, hyperbolic dialogue, charismatic scumbags, and a score heavy in electronic effects and percussion, the film effortlessly coasts on a gnarly old-school vibe.
  73. Formally, Huda’s Salon is nothing if not effective, sustaining the unrelenting tension of its opening scene for the duration of its runtime.
  74. The Wonder coheres as a powerful study of the way in which people are cloistered by their own stories.
  75. Jacob Gentry’s film punches through all the layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror.
  76. Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare.
  77. Memory House, much like Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Donnelles’s recent Bacarau, makes no secret of its disgust for neocolonialism, capitalism, or fascism, though it’s more skeptical of violent resistance even when exercised in self-defense.
  78. Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On convincingly proves that bigger sometimes is better.
  79. Întregalde is a sharply drawn and subtle fable about the meaning of charity and the limits of altruism.
  80. The film thrillingly captures the social, economic, political, and material character of Rwanda in the age of global communication.
  81. Throughout The Humans, Stephen Karam orchestrates the highs and lows of a family reunion with Chekhovian subtlety.
  82. Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s documentary rather faithfully captures the spirit of our times.
  83. Robert Greene’s gaze is an attempt to accord his subjects the dignity of attention, utilizing cinema as a form of emotional due process.
  84. With expert visual precision, the film flows into each new, wild narrative wrinkle as if it were the most logical thing in the world.
  85. A film that so clearly takes delight in the unfolding of a story and the unpacking of an enigmatic character is refreshing in an arthouse landscape where such narrative qualities are often relegated to secondary concerns.
  86. Writer-director Kiro Rosso’s sociological, pseudo-documentary film suggests a mosaic resolving out of innumerable shards.
  87. Matthew Heineman’s documentary successfully emphasizes how people’s emotions were whipsawed by an unprecedented crisis.
  88. This strange time capsule of late 1960s dementia more or less lives up to its oddball reputation—too unnerving to fall into the category of horror comedies but too cutesy to be labeled as a straight-up shocker a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In other words, it’s unclassifiable, which has amplified its cult appeal.
  89. The Tsugua Diaries is something like Memento for an age of isolation and listlessness.
  90. The film’s quietly uncanny narrative wondrously depicts not only a dying man’s reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself.
  91. The film is a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Quiet Man remains one of the purest distillations of this charismatic filmmaker’s diverse artistic nature.
  92. Even if the narrative threads aren’t as tightly focused on exploring a complex theme as one might hope, The Body Snatcher nevertheless manages to still send chills, and predominately through Wise’s fleet direction and Karloff’s unflinching embodiment of a real-world monster.
  93. Though often abstract in its imagery, the film’s blistering commentary remains firmly rooted in our present reality.
  94. Throughout You Won’t Be Alone, writer-director Goran Stolevski rejects the slickness that defines so-called elevated horror.
  95. The film is a vivid rumination on the fuzzy border between fantasy and reality.
  96. Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

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