Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Legend of Ochi
    A simplicity of spirit guides writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s fable-like feature debut.
  2. Mother Mary
    The film is a boldly theatrical pop exorcism where the wounds of the past serve as a gateway to forces that can consume or lift the possessed to ecstatic new levels of self-expression.
  3. Oh, Canada
    There’s a sense here of Paul Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible.
  4. The Outrun
    With The Outrun’s neat but poignant metaphor work in mind, mental illness and addiction are understood as natural responses to the conditions of a ravaged life.
  5. Union
    The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.
  6. Sasquatch Sunset
    What we’re confronted with in the film may be less the quaint idiocy of four dull simians and more our own inability to loosen up and just live.
  7. The First Omen
    Pulsating in the film’s veins is an eerie eroticism and a tactile awareness of the way the Church is controlling the bodies and minds of its women.
  8. Abigail
    While there’s plenty to be said about Abigail’s impressively over-the-top scarlet mean streak, the hellride that the filmmakers take us on is all the more effective for the character groundwork laid prior.
  9. Skin Deep
    Though as fresh and conceptually far-reaching as a David Cronenberg film, it traffics in body ambivalence more than body horror, striking an eerie, wistful tone.
  10. Veni Vidi Vici
    The film’s humor is a clenched-fist assault on runaway greed and systemic corruption.
  11. Daughters
    The importance of touch between a parent and child—and, in the case of this film, specifically between a father and daughter—is rarely discussed openly in Daughters, but it looms large over nearly every scene.
  12. Girls State
    For chafing against existing systems designed by and for men, the storytelling structure of the film befits the female experience in American politics.
  13. Power
    Throughout Power, Yance Ford draws a startlingly clear line from the origins of modern policing as a slave patrol to its present-day iteration.
  14. Stress Positions
    The film is an insightful look at modern discontent and the pandemonium that it breeds.
  15. Good One
    The film instinctively and lucidly shows how sometimes a coming of age can be thrust upon a person against their will.
  16. Brief History of a Family
    The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions that can cast a pall over family life.
  17. Nocturnes
    The film is uplifting in its understated optimism that understanding of the natural world driven by technology might accompany understanding of the divine.
  18. Thelma
    It’s the balance of comedy and existential drama that truly elevates Thelma.
  19. Black Box Diaries
    The film leaves on a razor’s edge between hope and despair, encouraged on the one hand by the passion with which justice is being demanded and, on the other, depressed by the widespread indifference with which these demands are met.
  20. Kneecap
    Much of Rich Peppiatt’s film isn’t about respectability, but rather debasement, and sugar-coating Kneecap’s widespread antics isn’t on the menu.
  21. Rob Peace
    The things that elevate Chiwetel Ejiofor’s film are those that elevated Rob Peace’s life overall.
  22. Monkey Man
    Monkey Man is in no rush to get where it’s going and Dev Patel puts a lot of trust in his audience to stick with him to see where it arrives.
  23. In the Summers
    One of the film’s great strengths resides in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry.
  24. Babes
    By turns tender and raucous, Pamela Adlon’s feature-length directorial debut, Babes, spins the uneasy, unwelcome, weirdly cool corporeal realities of pregnancy into heartfelt comic gold.
  25. The Last Stop in Yuma County
    There are little moments of blackhearted comedy among the bloodshed, but through it all, The Last Stop in Yuma County makes sure that those gunshots resonate.
  26. Carry-On
    The star of the show here is Collet-Serra. Nothing here reinvents the genre wheel, but the way that the stakes and scope of Carry-On keep escalating even as the focus remains resolutely intimate and paranoid showcases a refreshingly old-school grasp of thriller mechanics.
  27. Suspended Time
    Olivier Assayas’s film is a gently smart and warm-spirited look at love as the core term of human existence.
  28. Superman
    This film finally admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.
  29. Dementia 13
    Dementia 13 has always been a chilling and confident horror mixtape, fashioned by a man who was a few years away from consecutively producing four of the most famous of all American movies.
  30. Arcadian
    Even as the shotgun shells start flying, it makes time for the quiet dramatic moments that carry its family drama forward amid the carnage.
  31. Blackout
    As in his prior work, the far-reaching curiosity and fascinatingly conflicted nature of Fessenden’s perspective is still his greatest strength.
  32. Alien: Romulus
    Romulus ends up as the franchise’s strongest entry in three decades for its devotion to deploying lean genre mechanics.
  33. The Party
    The comically rich visual tapestry of Blake Edwards’s The Party still endures.
  34. Lost Soulz
    Lost Soulz is a road-trip movie driven by good vibrations and the joy of making music.
  35. Egoist
    Though Egoist can sometimes feel overly tidy, there’s something refreshing about its straightforward approach. Consistent with its style, which is so free of ornament, it pursues its themes with a welcome directness.
  36. The Phoenician Scheme
    The raw emotion underlying The Phoenician Scheme peeks out at unexpected times.
  37. Art College 1994
    The precise contrast of stasis and flux, of the sublime and the quotidian, of simple personal dreams swallowed up by massive national ambitions, characterizes Liu Jian’s latest.
  38. The Tarnished Angels
    Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.
  39. Zootopia 2
    Zootopia 2 provides plenty of food for thought for its young audience, making a more expansive statement on the dangers of intolerance than the first film, and without sacrificing any of its charm, humor, or visual ingenuity along the way.
  40. Magnificent Obsession
    Magnificent Obsession was a decisive turning point for Douglas Sirk, kicking off a beloved string of loopy ’50s melodramatic masterpieces.
  41. The Instigators
    Like a well-executed heist, the film knows how to get in and get out with minimal fuss.
  42. The Grab
    The Grab makes a clear choice to conclude not just with doomsaying, but with a call to action and a look at the things that can still be done to avert a global crisis.
  43. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Rugano Nyoni’s critique of her native country’s gender-based discrimination is as acerbic as it is unforgiving.
  44. Caught by the Tides
    Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides attests to the fact that making art under the most adverse conditions can prove to be serendipitous.
  45. M3GAN 2.0
    Imagine John Waters at the helm of a Terminator 2 remake and you have an inkling of just how wild a pivot M3GAN 2.0 is from its predecessor.
  46. Drop
    The film knows that when the stakes are sky high, the emotions need to be firmly grounded.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Misericordia
    Misericordia finds Alain Guiraudie revisiting old standbys under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever.
  48. Eephus
    Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.
  49. Rumours
    The film is winningly defined by its peculiar admixture of national pride and self-deprecation.
  50. Universal Language
    Though juxtaposing Canada’s drabness and relative lack of heritage with Iran’s millennia of unbroken tradition brings out the former aspects particularly clearly, Universal Language is aiming beyond mere satire or culture-clash playfulness.
  51. Souleymane's Story
    Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.
  52. Samsara
    The film exemplifies Lois Patiño’s ongoing efforts to complicate docufiction approaches with otherworldly reveries meant to communicate states beyond our immediate reality.
  53. The Nature of Love
    The Nature of Love engages with the stylings and bubbly tonality of the classic rom-com in ironic fashion, along the way exploring complex aspects of human behavior.
  54. Bugonia
    The film unearths new depths of existential anxiety engendered by the increasingly tumultuous 2020s.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Vulcanizadora
    Joel Potrykus looks without flinching at the ultimate consequences of permanent adolescence.
  56. Look Into My Eyes
    Leave it to a documentarian to find subjects who profess a similar faith in the power of ecstatic rather than merely objective truth.
  57. Sweet Dreams
    The film captures the putrefaction of colonial rule with a morbid sense of humor.
  58. Family Portrait
    If the edge of Kerr’s scalpel is blunted somewhat by the sheer number of other films that show the “dark underbelly of suburbia,” Family Portrait stands out for its profound mistrust, not just of images but of the sense of sight altogether.
  59. Buck and the Preacher
    For all of Buck and the Preacher’s serious attempts to function as a revisionist western by centering Blacks in the narrative and examining the critical role they played on the frontier, it’s also a wildly entertaining film.
  60. Smile 2
    Parker Finn, like his entity, is interested in getting his bony fingers into those sticky tender parts we’d rather hide away, slurping our pain like ambrosia and confronting us with the fact that more often than not, the enemy staring back is you.
  61. The Monkey
    The mayhem that the monkey doles out makes The Monkey closer in spirit to Evil Dead than Final Destination, as the film is less a Rube Goldberg contraption of overdesigned chaos than it is a Looney Tunes-esque spectacle of quick and dirty violence that hits like a punchline.
  62. Heretic
    Heretic intriguingly plays with our expectations of who the heroes and villains are in this scenario.
  63. Last Hurrah for Chivalry
    Not yet a master, Woo here nonetheless demonstrates far more than mere potential as he starts to lay the foundations for his breakout successes.
  64. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
    The film’s open affection for the Looney Tunes franchise has a restorative quality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Murder by Decree
    It’s a heady brew of highly improbable extraction that would go on to inspire Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell.
  66. F1: The Movie
    F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger.
  67. The Tales of Hoffmann
    If The Tales of Hoffmann fails as an emotional journey, it is sensational as a music video.
  68. Memoir of a Snail
    Adam Elliot, whose work is no stranger to despondency, never allows the film to fully succumb to despair.
  69. Bookworm
    Ant Timpson’s heartwarming Bookworm is an effulgent love letter to ’80s kid cinema laced with a distinctly quirky, Kiwi dryness.
  70. Dillinger
    This rough, lurid, pointedly un-preachy work of macho outlaw cinema, one of the best of the many John Dillinger movies, deserves to be better known.
  71. Babygirl
    It’s not a film about saying the right thing so much as it’s about people mutually arriving at the right place—no matter the untidiness involved in getting there.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
    Grau eschews the claustrophobia and siege mentality of George A. Romero’s film, instead playing out some of his more disturbing set pieces against the painterly verdure of the British countryside, as well as making the most of the uncanny atmosphere provided by the Gothic Revival architecture of the film’s locations.
  73. Transformers One
    A realm without physical limits is truly where the Transformers belong, but it doesn’t stop the film from delivering some surprising pathos while it’s there.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
    Soi Cheang richly draws the city as both prison and refuge, where brutal exploitation sits alongside the residents’ deep sense of solidarity and cooperation.
  75. House
    Equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.
  76. Blue Sun Palace
    Blue Sun Palace’s tale is filled with quiet spaces, and the way the texture of this quiet changes over the course of the film is a testament to its power.
  77. Youth (Hard Times)
    The second installment in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.
  78. Holy Cow
    The rhythms and structure of Holy Cow embody the swirling confusion and contradictions of adolescence itself.
  79. Things Will Be Different
    In many ways, the film feels like a micro-budget rendition of Tenet, as our heroes discover that they’ve been caught in a “vice-grip” between past and future that functions much like that film’s famous “temporal pincer.”
  80. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    The film combines cutting-edge Japanese animation with the audiovisual language established by Peter Jackson’s original trilogy of films.
  81. April
    April’s frames seek to embody a dizzying span of human experience, even if Dea Kulumbegashvili occasionally strains to corral it.
  82. 40 Acres
    40 Acres continually finds clever ways to either subvert familiar story beats or to make them land with extra impact.
  83. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    There’s an alive-ness that emanates from the characters, in large part due to all those visible fingerprints and indentations on their skins—a tactile counterbalance to a story about humanity’s over-reliance on technology.
  84. Friendship
    The film plays right into Tim Robinson’s sweet spot of surrealistic and satirical comedy.
  85. Kill the Jockey
    Kill the Jockey’s originality consists not just in taking the clichéd metaphor of rebirth literally, but in casually ratcheting that literalness to ever more fantastical degrees.
  86. Cloud
    Kurosawa Kiyoshi is an empathetic yet pitiless poet of the modern void.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bonjour Tristesse
    The film finds a state of grace in that torrential pull between the familiar and the new.
  88. Went Up the Hill
    Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.
  89. From Ground Zero
    The film is a stirring testament to art as a tool of survival, to the power of community art-making to affirm life in the face of omnipresent death, and to a nationless people’s desire to be seen by and engage in dialogue with the community of nations.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Uncle
    Mon Oncle is not Jacques Tati’s most ambitious film, nor his most democratic. It is quite possibly, however, his most didactic and depressing.
  91. Afternoons of Solitude
    In the absence of any overt commentary, the film’s more open-ended choices in editing and music take on added significance.
  92. Flow
    Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.
  93. Who by Fire
    One of Who by Fire’s greatest assets is Philippe Lesage’s willingness to shift the tenor of the film to fit the wildly divergent narrative concerns of any given sequence.
  94. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.
  95. The Sacrifice
    In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission.
  96. One Of Them Days
    The film revives Friday’s spirit while bringing its own flavor, and taking the current state of the world into full account.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling
    Like his stand-up, Pryor deftly mixes humor and tragedy, subtly tweaking familiar tales from his routines.
  98. Lilo & Stitch
    Here, “ohana” doesn’t just mean family but community, and the film does moving and spirited work in showcasing how crucial it is for us to lift each other up.
  99. 28 Years Later
    The film’s conception of the future, perceptively, looks back to humankind’s primeval past.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »