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. Biosphere
    Mel Eslyn’s film is a thoughtful drama about life, gender, and male friendship.
  2. Air
    Air is shot through with an infectious energy, but it’s more poignant for the way that it rhymes the histories of its actors in the public eye with all that Nike’s creatives were struggling to reconcile when they were chasing after Jordan.
  3. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    For devotees of the franchise, Nia Vardalos's film will be a surprisingly emotional trip home.
  4. BlackBerry
    By emphasizing the people in its tech tale, and the comedic possibilities in their mismatch, rather than the gee-whiz factor, Matt Johnson frees BlackBerry from the need to convince its audience how important the invention at its center was.
  5. Manodrome
    While John Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.
  6. Reality
    The film interrogates both the state of our world and the lines between fiction and document.
  7. The Survival of Kindness
    An epic adventure in the guise of an arthouse flick, The Survival of Kindness makes up in visual power and moral clarity what it lacks in subtext.
  8. Carmen
    By stripping the story back to its most elemental form, Benjamin Millepied makes it feel mythic, poetic, and captivatingly romantic.
  9. The Killer
    David Fincher dabbles in the pleasures of genre without ever allowing the outlandish scenario to be treated with more respect than it deserves.
  10. Stonewalling
    Stonewalling is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid (for China) women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications.
  11. Limbo
    The cinematography solidifies the film’s status as a noir grappling with corruption and probing moral grey areas, while at the same time echoing visually the stark divisions between white and Indigenous people in Australian society.
  12. #Manhole
    Kumakiri Kazuyoshi counters the comic absurdity with a genuinely discomfiting sense of the manhole’s atmosphere, and threads of intrigue that are already mostly spun by the time you see them.
  13. Music
    Initially, more than mere fun, Angela Schanelec’s approach to storytelling is surprisingly affecting, but once you’ve figured out how to play, the game begins to feel a bit, well, ancient.
  14. The Shadowless Tower
    The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads.
  15. The Sterile Cuckoo
    Alan J. Pakula’s directorial debut takes a done-to-death story template and revitalizes it with intelligence, maturity, and tenderness.
  16. The Teachers' Lounge
    While Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge makes full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting, it doesn’t exceed its remit by turning the story into a referendum on society.
  17. in water
    Connoisseurs of Hong Sang-soo’s cinema will no doubt be fascinated by the transcendent minimalism of the film, which suggests Picasso knocking off a sketch on a piece of paper in a matter of seconds.
  18. The Innocent
    The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.
  19. Under Capricorn
    Though Under Capricorn’s dark and twisty narrative eventually unearths everyone’s secrets, it’s the swooning camera that most fully taps into the class and sexual tensions that consume the characters.
  20. Orlando, My Political Biography
    Orlando, My Political Biography languishes in an undefinable interstitial space, floating between fiction and essay film.
  21. The Endless Summer
    True to its title, The Endless Summer exudes a blissful, mellow buzz that could easily be misconstrued as lazy or innocuous filmmaking.
  22. Self Reliance
    There’s never any danger of Self Reliance’s reach exceeding its grasp, but it gets a firm handle on the things it does want to achieve: tell good jokes, craft likeable characters, and strike a lighthearted tone that’s always just a little bit odder than you may be expecting.
  23. Arnold Is a Model Student
    Even at its most confrontational, the film maintains a carefully controlled deadpan tone.
  24. The Beasts
    The film is as much about the beastliness of outmoded machismo as it is about the perseverance and fortitude of women in opposition to it.
  25. Passion
    Passion already finds Hamaguchi Ryûsuke to be a superb orchestrator of moods and tones.
  26. Plan 75
    Because so much of Hayakawa’s film is given over to depictions of the procedures, formalities, and impersonal administration that define Plan 75, even the tiniest spark of feeling comes as a relief.
  27. House of Wax
    It’s Price that gives House of Wax its characteristic balance of elegance and lurid theatricality.
  28. The Oak
    The film’s naïve utopianism is infectious, demanding that we live as though life were worth it in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
  29. Winter Boy
    Christophe Honoré’s film tackles grief in a subtle, intriguingly indirect manner.
  30. The First Slam Dunk
    The First Slam Dunk is able to throw a relentless series of new gambits, twists, and reversals at the screen that will keep even seasoned sports film fans on the edge of their seat.
  31. Poor Things
    As imaginative as the film’s comedy can be, its greatest asset is Emma Stone’s ability to situate Bella Baster first as jester, then as the emotional foundation upon which the whole of Poor Things is built.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pictures of Ghosts
    As always with Kleber Mendonça Filho, to reflect reality isn’t enough, as cinema has to find its own truth, even if it takes some imagination to get there.
  33. The Creator
    With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.
  34. The Snake Pit
    As Virginia grapples with her inner demons, as well as a memory loss that leaves her disoriented and unsure of who she can trust, The Snake Pit periodically transcends its archaic psychological trappings to become an empathic examination of a woman battling both the internal and external forces that seek to fully erase her sense of self.
  35. In Our Day
    For Hong Sang-oo, In Our Day is a gesture toward recognizing the beautiful, awful, and uncanny.
  36. Anatomy of a Fall
    At its best, Anatomy of a Fall is nothing less than a rigorous modern treatise on the knotty interpersonal dynamics of long-term relationships and how conveniently they can be distorted when exposed to public scrutiny.
  37. Four Daughters
    A fascinating metacommentary courses beneath the film’s emotional storytelling surface.
  38. The Breaking Ice
    The Breaking Ice is fixated on intense in-between states that work to separate people from each other and from themselves, as if to say self-acceptance and love aren’t destinations so much as journeys, at once formidable and worthwhile.
  39. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    The story is kept at a stress-inducing simmer, with occasional surges of operatic emotion.
  40. The Taste of Things
    The film views the love of food and romance as all one singular desire for everything beautiful and fleeting in life.
  41. Last Summer
    The film somehow feels tight, open and leisurely, and cloaked in dread all at once.
  42. The Old Oak
    If Ken Loach has always erred on making his political views impossible to misconstrue, he also knows how to keep his dramas from spiraling too far outside of plausibility.
  43. The Animal Kingdom
    The soft-pedaled approach to its narrative strands gives the film the feel of an extended TV pilot.
  44. Amanda
    Carolina Cavalli’s film consecrates a ferocity as refreshing as it is infectious.
  45. Woman of the Year
    Woman of the Year certainly has its other auxiliary charms: beautifully textured lighting by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg; a luminous, if limited, performance by Fay Bainter as Tess’s motherly aunt; and some enchanting simulations of soft winter snowfall. But it’s hard not to feel berated, in a time that’s seeing the resurgence of a pernicious nationalism, by both the film’s anti-feminist slant and its insistent compulsion to put a box around Americanism.
  46. The Graduates
    While Hannah Peterson, with her emphasis on quiet moments and mementos mori, effectively suffuses The Graduates with a mournful absence of life, she also reminds us of the warmth that can be so typical of high school.
  47. Rotting in the Sun
    At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.
  48. Happer's Comet
    Whereas films like Halloween and Blue Velvet expose the violence and perversion that underlies the manicured artifice of so many suburban environs, Happer’s Comet, by means of a simple temporal displacement, gestures above all at their arbitrariness.
  49. The Eternal Memory
    Maite Alberdi’s film slowly reveals the personal loss of the ability to remember as inextricably linked to the loss of national memory.
  50. Ferrari
    That liminal space between the peaks and the valleys of a person’s life is what Michael Mann is most interested in exploring.
  51. Red Rooms
    Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.
  52. The Mother of All Lies
    Through her use of recreation, Asmae El Moudir suggests that the act of documentary filmmaking can turn historical truths into fiction, in which everyone becomes an active participant.
  53. Return to Dust
    The film is best in moments when the bond between two outcasts is made corporeal and fully present.
  54. Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia
    A unique joie de vivre courses through A Trip to Gibberitia’s every meticulously composed frame.
  55. Madeleine Collins
    Seemingly channeling the spirit of Claude Chabrol, Antoine Barraud’s Madeleine Collins is a decidedly classy throwback thriller about a seemingly humdrum character committing perverse acts of subterfuge against others.
  56. The Iron Claw
    With scalpel-like precision, the film exposes the agonies of fathers, sons, and brothers.
  57. They Died with Their Boots On
    Even if historical erroneousness intermittently undermines the film’s outlandish attempts at lionization, They Died with Their Boots On endures as one of the finest Flynn-de Havilland collaborations, providing a grand stage for the duo’s playful, poignant rapport.
  58. Venom: The Last Dance
    As the film progresses, it consistently escalates the stakes and scale of its action, which doesn’t devolve into incomprehensible CG murk as it hurtles toward the climax.
  59. Coup de Chance
    The film is at once among Woody Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.
  60. Wings
    Seen today, Wings impresses mostly with its enormous scale—its appearance of having been made with obscene amounts of money.
  61. Evil Does Not Exist
    Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Evil Does Not Exist is a turn away from the filmmaker’s empathy of his earlier work toward an aesthetic that’s jagged and chilly.
  62. AGGRO DR1FT
    It may indeed be the perfect cinematic representation of our current media landscape, adapting to our collective brain rot from being terminally online instead of fighting against it.
  63. Once Within a Time
    The film proposes that, in the search for viable alternatives to techno-fascism and climate apocalypse, we might look to the margins of our world, to unfulfilled experiments (including those of cinema) and cultures supposedly left behind by history.
  64. June Zero
    June Zero is a tender, if sometimes cynical, portrait of a new country on old land struggling through the growing pains of establishing its presence both to the international community and its own people.
  65. The Promised Land
    Even when it’s painting its story in broad strokes, the film plays expertly to audience emotion.
  66. Remembering Every Night
    The film is a gentle evocation of contemporary Japanese life in its pleasures and frustrations.
  67. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    Under Sora Neo’s direction, each number becomes a mini-study of Sakamoto and the grand piano he plays on.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hit Man
    Many of Richard Linklater’s films are united by their celebration of the pretentious in its etymological meaning of “playing pretend.” With Hit Man, he and Glenn Powell take this further by demonstrating that acting isn’t just entertainment or art—it’s also a fundamental part of our lives.
  69. The Royal Hotel
    In this film of clammy anxiety, the potential of male violence is made to feel as scary as the actual article.
  70. Thanksgiving
    This Thanksgiving is a slasher for today, slickly made, coolly mean, and with a satiric bite.
  71. Janet Planet
    Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.
  72. Godzilla Minus One
    For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.
  73. When Evil Lurks
    Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.
  74. Dream Scenario
    Kristoffer Borgli’s film presents a perfectly absurdist setup that allows Nicolas Cage to flex his singular acting muscles in increasingly hilarious directions.
  75. Waitress: The Musical
    The film accomplishes its principal goal of capturing Sara Bareilles’s spectacular take on Jenna Hunterson, especially in its close-ups of the singer-songwriter.
  76. His Three Daughters
    His Three Daughters sneaks up on you, for as chatty, monologue-forward as Jacobs’s screenplay may be, it conveys so much through absence and suggestion.
  77. The Monk and the Gun
    The film pulls off something truly bold: taking what are perhaps the most emotionally and symbolically loaded items in existence and subverting their meaning completely to end on a note of peace, joy, and hope for the future.
  78. She Is Conann
    Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, Bertrand Mandico’s film is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem.
  79. Mountains
    Mountains interprets leisure not so much as the opposite of work or struggle, but a stance that can and should suffuse each moment of life, not discounting those we sell to make a living.
  80. The Human Surge 3
    While its globe-trotting sense of wonder shows the joys of offline existence to be as profound and vivid as they ever were, its simultaneous sense of boundless possibility and stagnant futility recalls nothing so much as the chaotic, alienating realm of cyberspace that both birthed and shaped it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Still Small Voice
    The film does a fine job of holding a mirror to the experience of therapeutic practice.
  82. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
    Director Francis films the scenes that center around the vampire with yellow-brown gels around the frames’ edges, giving the impression that they too are from Dracula’s omniscient view. They give Dracula Has Risen From the Grave a musty, jaundiced sensuality (like finding Great Aunt Mildred’s mothball stank-ridden garter belt hidden in the back of her Victorian closet) that characterizes Hammer’s blending of gothic tradition with modern prurience.
  83. We Grown Now
    The film is held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Silent Night
    When Silent Night does finally kick into high gear, the action is as artful as anything that Woo has whipped up throughout his storied career.
  85. Powaqqatsi
    Powaqqatsi is every bit as viscerally engaging though less provocative than its predecessor.
  86. Ex-Husbands
    The film is full of little moments that speak clearly to the particularities of father-son bonds.
  87. Strange Darling
    Strange Darling is a cunningly devised thriller that wields our assumptions against us like a sharp implement, delighting in making us squirm.
  88. Concrete Utopia
    This darkly comic and consistently revealing tale suggests that, without four walls around us to prop them up, most of our morals would crumble into dust.
  89. The Book of Clarence
    The film does keep the smirking undercurrent of the first half present in the more serious second, but, slowly but surely, it starts asking big questions about the nature of God, what measure of divinity lies in us all, and the value of basic humanity and grace in a world where God’s intervention isn’t a given.
  90. The Strangler (1970)
    This 1970 psychological thriller was Paul Vecchiali’s self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.
  91. Daaaaaalí!
    Quentin Dupieux melts the frames that separate dream, film, and reality until they become one plate of tangled spaghetti.
  92. Elio
    The film’s best trait is the one that permeates every truly great first-contact story—not just the hope that our first meeting with the strangest of strangers is benevolent, or that the universe is too vast to determine they all wish good or ill on us, but that connecting with humanity still has value.
  93. The Crime Is Mine
    It draws on the giddily rules-trampling pre-war mood as Chicago. But while its protagonists are as driven by a desire for fame and money as the amoral starlets of the Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse musical, the film has more than grinning cynicism at its core.
  94. Anora
    The film’s initial pull lies in the way that Sean Baker intoxicatingly keys his aesthetic to the fervor of a budding romance that we clearly know won’t end well.
  95. Terrifier 3
    Primarily a vehicle for inventive and wince-inducing practical effects that best anything to be found in a 1980s-era Italian gorefest or the Saw franchise, Terrifier 3 continues the series’s trend of dotting a sparse and sinuous thread of plot with mini-masterpieces of cinematic ultraviolence.
  96. The Stones and Brian Jones
    Via the film’s juxtaposition between footage of Jones performing in front of fawning crowds with the dark personal stories of those who knew him best, Nick Broomfield bitingly undercuts the rock star’s veneer of public adoration.
  97. Black God, White Devil
    By depicting revolutionary fiascos in a critical yet sympathetic light, Glauber Rocha calls on us to imagine what we’d want a revolution to look like, rather than having it spoon-fed to us by those claiming to represent a power beyond ourselves.
  98. The Shrouds
    The film shares with Crimes of the Future an alternately intrigued and critical fascination with the ways technology encroaches on humanity, and a paranoid interest in rooting out underlying conspiracies.
  99. Mickey 17
    Though Mickey 17 can feel like a mixtape of Bong’s greatest hits, it may actually be his most refined and articulate anti-capitalistic critique to date.
  100. Death of a Unicorn
    Death of a Unicorn taps into the anti-capitalist strain in late-20th-century monster movies from Alien to Jurassic Park by tracing a clever through line from the unicorns of antiquity to the present.
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