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. Warfare
    This is a formidable technical showcase and obsessive forensic recreation whose imposed formal limitations become meaning-making ends in and of themselves.
  2. Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    Sly Lives! pays appropriate credit to its subject’s greatness by not devolving into pity even after depicting Stone at his lowest points.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    There's Still Tomorrow
    It’s a film about domestic violence that, while clearly intended as an homage to Italian neorealism, finds levity through choreographed musical numbers and moments of light magical realism.
  4. Riefenstahl
    If there’s still anyone uncritically repeating Riefenstahl’s narrative of naïveté, they’ll find it hard to sustain by the end credits.
  5. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    The Ballad of Wallis Island plays both its drama and comedy in decidedly minor keys, straining neither for grand emotional revelations nor big laughs.
  6. Sanjuro
    Sanjuro is still a lesson from a master in mounting choreography and sustaining momentum, though it remains more of an exercise rather than a work of flesh and blood.
  7. Dreams
    A story of hazy memories that’s also a city symphony, Dreams elegantly captures the disorienting rush of first love and the frustrations and anguish that stem from romantic fantasies colliding with reality.
  8. Lurker
    The artist and audience member are coequal—and codependent—in this perceptive drama about a parasocial relationship that enters the realm of reality.
  9. Rabbit Trap
    It’s when the film plays in the gaps between sound and image that it’s most disturbing.
  10. The Wedding Banquet
    The humor lands as if it’s coming not from the writers but through the characters by its grounding in the details of their lives.
  11. Peter Hujar's Day
    The film attests not only to the breadth of Sachs’s artistry but also to Hujar’s devotion to exploring the relationship between high and low culture.
  12. Rebuilding
    If there’s any sense of motion in the film, which is largely defined by its patient camerawork and editing, it’s in Dusty’s gradual recognition of and response to the emotions that accompany his corporal yearning to remain in place.
  13. Twinless
    The film is a bizarrely moving and darkly comic story about feeling like you’ve lost something you never had.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mr. Nobody Against Putin
    The film starkly reveals the toll propaganda takes on everyday individuals and communities.
  15. The Ugly Stepsister
    Emilie Blichfeldt knows the exact point of queasiness to which she can push an audience and gradually tests how much further she can move that mark with each successive scene.
  16. 2000 Meters to Andriivka
    The interjections of quotidian reflection give a fullness and emotional resonance to a film that can, at times, be borderline oppressive in its depiction of war’s brutality.
  17. Zodiac Killer Project
    Zodiac Killer Project is a wicked embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the media itself being the message.
  18. OBEX
    Albert Birney knows that fantasy is a potent force, that it can lead you deep into the worst parts of yourself, or, with the right influences, lead you back to life.
  19. Predators
    Always exhibiting a deftness of touch and willingness to continue probing a cultural taboo that’s now, more than ever, a delicate and charged topic, Obit also challenges our preconceptions of a much-maligned group.
  20. The Things You Kill
    Alireza Khatami’s third feature is a subtly enigmatic examination of the nature of masculinity.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Seeds
    Brittany Shyne’s lens is held rapt by the ramblings and insights of the elderly, but it springs to life when it’s turned toward the next generation, whose future is of utmost concern in light of the socioeconomic tensions documented by the film.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Cactus Pears
    The film is at its best when it fashions itself as a kind of ouroboros where the future and the past, death and new love, circle back on one another.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
    Across the film, Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers an intimately observed portrait of Rico and the Bronx’s Dominican community, folding warmth into the very real pressures that define daily life.
  24. Blue Moon
    Blue Moon, like Lorenz Hart in his day, trusts that audiences want to engage with subjects that matter through deliberate dialogue.
  25. Bring Her Back
    The film has a white-hot nerve of pain running inside it that burns right through the screen.
  26. Ne Zha 2
    Jiaozi’s film is a sprawling, hyperkinetic exercise in mythological storytelling.
  27. Living the Land
    Huo Meng’s patient, nonjudgmental study of these people tacitly reveals the ways, healthy and otherwise, in which they’ve compartmentalized and continue to process the pain of everything from hard labor to political oppression.
  28. The Ice Tower
    The Ice Tower is, ultimately, an aesthetic and nostalgic exercise.
  29. Kontinental '25
    Radu Jude’s cinema isn’t exactly absurdist, though it exposes the absurdities of a present reeling from the unresolved injustices of yore.
  30. The Blue Trail
    An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.
  31. You Burn Me
    Matías Piñeiro’s film is an intimate, impressionistic meditation on love and desire, death and memory, silence and expression.
  32. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Ed Harris and Jessica Lange electrifyingly bring so many of their characters’ emotions to the surface, even as they convey that James and Mary are burying so much more beneath it.
  33. Young Hearts
    The film truthfully hints at the sharp whirs behind the smooth façade of everyday life.
  34. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    The film offers a joyous throwback to the optimistic feeling of the early internet creator era.
  35. Miracle Mile
    Miracle Mile is one of the most fascinating curios of the ’80s, a disaster movie that turns the decade’s optimism back onto itself.
  36. Clown in a Cornfield
    Eli Craig’s film works precisely because it plays things straight.
  37. The Threesome
    The film effortlessly melds its sadcom properties with more predictable rom-com traditions.
  38. LifeHack
    LifeHack is consistently intriguing for the conflicting emotions with which it looks back on its chosen moment in tech and time, characterized by cutthroat scamming and cynicism, as well as empowerment and camaraderie for the young and quick-witted.
  39. Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Christophers
    The film brims with hilarious dialogue, lightly satirical observations of a culture that treats art as a commodity, and satisfying payoffs to a number of story elements planted early on.
  41. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    By acknowledging and publicizing its subjects’ writing, the film proves a stirring tribute to those who fight; in their stories, it offers a potent reminder that war is a hell suffered both externally and—more permanently—internally.
  42. The Naked Gun
    The Naked Gun is of a piece with the “joke in every frame” approach that Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker brought to their best work.
  43. Direct Action
    We sorely need documentaries like Direct Action that can show not only the real leverage that militant mass movements can exert, but how that power can be redirected from protest to the building of autonomous communities and back again.
  44. Eddington
    Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress.
  45. Manon of the Spring
    This tonal shift transforms Manon of the Spring from a caustic morality play into something more reflective, an elegy to a way of life whose residents did not fully appreciate until they themselves had helped to end it.
  46. Predator: Badlands
    The action is horrifying, inventive, and heart-pounding, but it’s also the least surprising part of Predator: Badlands.
  47. Mountainhead
    If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.
  48. Young Mothers
    Young Mothers is a welcome return to form for the Dardenne brothers, balancing social observation with character study.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Miroirs No. 3
    Christian Petzold has crafted yet another sneakily trenchant commentary on How We Live Now.
  50. Left-Handed Girl
    In a young girl’s face is all of Left-Handed Girl, as Nina Ye, like Shih-Ching Tsou behind the camera, translates the immensity of this sprawling saga into immediate, intimate detail.
  51. The Bride!
    The Bride!’s aims to show that being good in a cruel world is as foolish as falling in love—as foolish as attempting to be out and proud freaks in a repressive society. Guillermo del Toro might be brave enough to let his monsters fight and fuck in their own defense, but Gyllenhaal and her monsters do it nastier, sloppier, and louder as an act of magnificent defiance.
  52. The Long Walk
    This ferocious adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novella as a passion play about class solidarity.
  53. Blackmail
    While the film lacks the feverish, autocritical neuroses of Hitchcock’s mid- and late-period masterpieces, it often superbly plumbs notions of guilt and vulnerability, all the while cheekily satirizing Scotland Yard as a swayable arbiter of justice.
  54. Megadoc
    Mike Figgis’s anthem of aspiration and struggle leaves no doubt about Francis Ford Coppola’s beliefs.
  55. The Paradine Case
    This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.
  56. The Secret Agent
    More broadly appealing than Kleber Mendonça Filho’s past films, The Secret Agent is still unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle.
  57. Predator: Killer of Killers
    Killer of Killers only gives us just enough to get by, get invested, and get to the goods.
  58. Urchin
    Harris Dickinson imbues the film with a singular style, as well as a self-awareness that’s introspective without stooping to outright self-flagellation.
  59. Sirât
    The film is a vivid meditation on human possibility in the face of fate and nature’s tumultuous might, ending in a fog of ambiguity that mirrors that characters’ bewilderment.
  60. Two Prosecutors
    The film is a satiric look at Stalinism and bureaucracy with shades of Kafka, Orwell, and Gogol.
  61. Pillion
    If there’s humor to be found in some of the particulars, it’s never to judge or to poke fun, but to revel in the very real delights of consensual sexual roleplay.
  62. It Was Just an Accident
    The film is astutely aware of the physical and psychological scars that that result from living in a state of tyranny.
  63. Splitsville
    Splitsville thrives on the unpredictability of this formal freedom before settling back into a familiar Hollywood narrative formula: the comedy of remarriage.
  64. Sentimental Value
    The film’s multi-layered structure supports a familiar but often profoundly affecting tale of intergenerational family conflict.
  65. Romería
    Carla Simón’s instinct for sketching in crucial narrative and character detail within a naturalistic context remains as unerring as ever.
  66. Yes
    Nadav Lapid’s film locates a dire spiritual crisis facing the nation of his birth.
  67. The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    A showcase for director Alfred Hitchcock’s intense study of the German Expressionist movement, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog boasts artfully animated intertitles, plunging shadows, and oppressive camera angles.
  68. My Father's Shadow
    Hope and fear are inextricably bound in Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical film.
  69. Jamaica Inn
    Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn would have been better titled The Gangs of Jamaica Inn, since the film is thoroughly concerned with groupings, allegiances, and the ways class standing relates to moral obligation.
  70. Sovereign
    Christian Swegal’s feature-length directorial debut is like staring into a national wound.
  71. Inside
    Charles Williams’s feature-length directorial debut, Inside, centers on a trio of dangerous men who are forced into each other’s orbit, leading to an outcome that’s both violently chaotic and tragically predictable.
  72. Videoheaven
    Alex Ross Perry doesn’t insert himself into something he views as bigger than himself, and that sense of reverence lends an emotional anchor to even the driest, disaffected parts of Videoheaven.
  73. La Grazia
    The relative restraint of La Grazia makes its baroque flourishes stand out all the more.
  74. Boys Go to Jupiter
    Julian Glander powerfully channeling the ennui of his characters with images of everything from vacant parking lots to empty swimming pools.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Life After
    The film may be most powerful for how Reid Davenport subtly connects the experience of the disabled community with that of marginalized diaspora groups at large.
  76. Preparation for the Next Life
    One small, shrewd decision after another allows Preparation for the Next Life to sustain its naturalism to the end.
  77. No Other Choice
    Across the film, “no other choice” becomes a kind of disingenuous mantra, demonstrating how platitudes and apathy reinforce a violent status quo.
  78. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
    Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass becomes a film about its own condition of being an outsider to its own time, lost as it is in the aesthetics of another time that it views with a kind of nostalgic disquiet.
  79. Is This Thing On?
    This is a finely observed and good-natured piece of work that carries some of the creative angst of Bradley Cooper’s other films but without the need to convince us of its main character’s genius.
  80. Mother of Flies
    Despite the affinity the Adams clan has displayed for spooky, goopy imagery in the past, Mother of Flies finds them reluctant to fully exercise those talents for fear of tipping their hand.
  81. A Samurai in Time
    A Samurai in Time isn’t just having fun with fake swords and chonmage wigs, as it also provides a lot of gentle reflections about history, modernity, and our place in it all.
  82. The Burmese Harp
    Ichikawa Kon’s 1956 film The Burmese Harp is a tender almost-musical film about the horrors of war and the obliteration of identity.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Is God Is
    Featuring larger-than-life characters described with epithets like “monster” and “the rough one,” and blending brutal violence with themes of generational trauma, abuse, and toxic masculinity, the film ponders what one does with the bottomless hate of being wronged.
  84. V/H/S/Halloween
    Every segment passes the basic scary-movie smell test of showing you something that you haven’t seen before, and that includes a truly depraved death involving a large quantity of gumballs.
  85. Arco
    Arco is a children’s adventure set in world that’s literally on fire, which makes the moments of childlike wonder and connection all the more endearing and vital.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Magellan
    The film bluntly puts its historical horrors on display, but it’s careful not to explicitly posit their causes.
  87. Sisu: Road to Revenge
    Much of Road to Revenge plays like a spectacularly gory silent film, with Aatami taking out scores of Red Army soldiers in action scenes that are as inventive as they are incredibly funny.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Where to Land
    Where to Land opts for quiet moments of connection, raising questions rather than giving definitive answers.
  89. Rose of Nevada
    The film plunges us into a world that feels simultaneously naturalistic and otherworldly.
  90. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    The film is less a portrait of one martyred man than a mosaic of a resistant community.
  91. The Stranger
    François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel is haunting, transportive, and tragically humanist, a worthy introduction to the text for the skeptical (or a refresher for the lapsed) and a memorably grim drama in its own right.
  92. Erupcja
    While it isn’t an overt examination of it in the manner of The Moment, the film does feel like a natural cinematic extension of Charli XCX’s melancholy party-girl persona.
  93. Pompei: Below the Clouds
    Gianfranco Rosi’s long, languorous, often hushed snapshots of the area between Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples conjure a sense of life here being suspended in time.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Sunshine
    Okuyama Hiroshi spins poetry from seemingly inconsequential moments.
  95. The Rip
    The film's legible direction and steady escalation of tension makes for an enjoyably retro diversion.
  96. Silent Friend
    Despite loose ends, it’s one of the most dreamily affectionate (and affectionately critical) portrayals of the natural sciences ever committed to the screen.
  97. 100 Meters
    To get to the primal thrill of racing, Iwaisawa Kenji uses just about every technique at his disposal.
  98. Trains
    The film's chronological rigor imparts an "on-rails" historical linearity, a sensation of inexorable progress and doom.
  99. Obsession
    Obsession’s big set-piece sequences are as chilling in their effect as they are confident in their execution.
  100. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s obviousness only makes its proximity to the real-life A.I. slop invasion more unnerving, and the extent of what humanity has accepted for convenience’s sake more abhorrent.
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