Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. El Sicario: Room 164
    A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Kid with a Bike
    If The Kid with a Bike is a fairy tale, it's the unsentimental kind that locates the dark enchantment in characters discovering themselves during their most despairing moments. Still, it's certainly the Dardennes' fleetest, warmest film to date.
  3. Robinson in Ruins
    Robinson's very name ties him to explorers like Crusoe and Walden, but he is also something like JLG's whispering leftist prankster who butted into 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her to intermittently spout rhetoric over images of freeways and construction sites.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Domain
    The ultimate drama of Domain becomes how long he can be a witness to her self-destruction.
  5. Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Something like a trippy grindhouse homage whose familiar images are refracted through a prism of blacklight posters, Jodorowsky films, and even Rob Zombie's grungy psychotropic sensibility.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Beasts of the Southern Wild
    Benh Zeitlin's lived-in, almost abstract sense of social realism is partly what makes the film so refreshing and uniquely affecting.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    This Is Not a Film
    In its way, this effort is both a forceful assertion of the most stifling brand of auteurism and a radical reconfiguration of its political potential.
  8. Children of Paradise (1945)
    Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.
  9. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    The exquisite live-action Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog may be the family film of the year.
  10. Unraveled
    Marc H. Simon's documentary has the thrust of a great American noir or black comedy.
  11. The Day He Arrives
    The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives.
  12. Jean Gentil
    Filmmakers Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas have crafted a beautiful tale of alienation, solitude, and existential anxiety.
  13. Sleepless Night
    After a few turns in the modest narrative, an unlikely sense of structural resilience begins to emerge.
  14. Portrait of Wally
    The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.
  15. Patience (After Sebald)
    A wide-ranging piece of literary criticism brought to vivid cinematic life, bursting with ideas and inspired visual translations of them.
  16. How to Survive a Plague
    Presents a cast of characters who must continue fighting, for what's at stake is the very real, very imminent threat of their own deaths.
  17. Bonsái
    Cristián Jiménez's film knows how entangled the will to know is with the will to make love.
  18. Flight
    A unique, audacious studio movie, kicking off as a star-driven spectacle before whittling itself down to a raw and riveting character study.
  19. Elena
    Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Oslo, August 31st
    The evocation of things ending suffuses the film with melancholy, as Anders increasingly becomes an observant rather than a participant in his own life.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Extraterrestrial
    In almost every respect, Extraterrestrial is an exceptional and traditional romantic comedy. It just happens to be set during an alien invasion.
  22. El Velador
    El Velador doesn't pass judgment or manipulate emotionally, instead choosing simply to consider the arduousness of survival in a land wracked by slaughter.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Cosmopolis
    Diamond-hard and dazzlingly brilliant, David Cronenberg's film plays like a deeply perverse, darkly comic successor to Videodrome.
  24. Annie Hall
    Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is made of such durable stuff that it’s liked even by many of the filmmaker’s detractors, and yet it had such a troubled production that it’s a miracle it exists at all.
  25. Farewell, My Queen
    Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Alps
    Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of "Dogtooth," it builds on that film's surreally terse style and notions of communication and identity without diluting its singularity or concentration.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    Just as Rirkrit Tiravanija had done in the '90s when he converted New York City galleries into live kitchens, he changes one's relation to a movie theater to a space for meditation.
  28. Lincoln
    Steven Spielberg's film may further the heroism so associated with its subject, and favor a liberal viewpoint that leers down at the Confederates, but it's no bleeding-heart glamorization.
  29. Meet the Fokkens
    Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's documentary is an unusual and welcome polemic.
  30. Max and the Junkmen (1971)
    Regarding Michel Piccoli's Max, Claude Sautet's film resists judgment, neither condoning nor signposting the despicable nature of his choices.
  31. This Must Be the Place
    The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.
  32. Not Fade Away
    Triumphs when David Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories
  33. Vamps
    A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart.
  34. Girl Model
    The documentary makes you wonder about every beautiful woman who's ever stared out from a publication, poster, or billboard, looking sophisticated and self-assured.
  35. Las Acacias
    This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation.
  36. Beauty Is Embarrassing
    Neil Berkeley's documentary is as puckish as its subject, so steeped in artist Wayne White's creative juices that it makes you want to go straight home and start making things.
  37. The Comedy
    Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it.
  38. Photographic Memory
    Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.
  39. Gayby
    While Jonathan Lisecki is well in tune with his film's niche market, his knack for comedy, both visual and verbal, is universally hilarious.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Bestiaire
    Bestiaire argues persuasively without words, making a case without explicating one at all.
  41. Girl Walk: All Day
    "You should always be happy." That's a succinct encapsulation of the proudly optimistic spirit animating this joyous film, a worldview which the rest of Girl Walk // All Day illustrates with a combination of thrilling street ballet, exultant music, and unflagging verve.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Brief Encounters is great entertainment.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    In Another Country
    Hong Sang-soo hits the beach once again in his latest project, another austerely amusing study of hopeless neurotics making a mockery of leisure.
  44. Burn
    The endless scenes of burning buildings and macho posturing merely provide an action-driven context for the filmmakers to deal with more personal topics like loneliness and resiliency.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nothing But a Man (1964)
    It can't be overstated just how Nothing But a Man is militantly tone-deaf to the Hollywood muzak of race relations.
  46. Miami Connection (1987)
    Love it or hate it, it's doubtful you'll ever forget it, and it may just force you to redefine your definition of what constitutes "good" cinema.
  47. The Law in These Parts
    A film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Buffalo Girls
    Todd Kellstein doesn't allow you to entirely indulge convenient (though understandable and perhaps irresistible) armchair outrage.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Upstream Color
    Upstream Color is lush, rhythmic, and deeply sensual, a film of exceptional beauty.
  50. Before Midnight
    These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape.
  51. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    With the film, Lee Daniels quietly pushes his talent for hashing out visceral, violent emotions into unexpected dramatic terrain.
  52. Little Fugitive (re-release)
    The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.
  53. Back to the Future
    Back to the Future stands up on its own as a well-oiled, brilliantly-edited example of new-school, Spielberg-cultivated thrill-craft, one that endures even now that its visual effects and haw-haw references to Pepsi Free and reruns seem as dated as full-service gas stations apparently did in 1985.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    11 Flowers
    Because of its choice in subjectivity, and despite the film's historical context, 11 Flowers firmly elevates the experience of the personal over the political.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Beyond the Hills
    It's Cristian Mungiu's staging and compositional skill that lends the material its true sense of dawning dread.
  56. Graceland
    The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.
  57. The We and the I
    A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.
  58. Le Petit Soldat (re-release)
    Compared to "Breathless," Le Petit Soldat's images suggest a stronger sense of place, as characters seem inextricably linked to their environment. Overall, the film lacks the artifice of Hollywood cinema, which Godard admired but was looking to move past after catching flack from the French left wing.
  59. Stories We Tell
    Sarah Polley is much more interested in the malleability of memory and the consequential refractions felt throughout her kin rather than telling a linear narrative.
  60. Clip
    A raw, sophisticated, and stomach-turning look at what it means to be a young woman in Serbia, what it means to be a woman tout court.
  61. Vanishing Waves
    A scintillating sci-fi throwback, Vanishing Waves draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, but without feeling plagiaristic.
  62. Blue Caprice
    The filmmakers are more interested in questioning what brings people to commit senseless and merciless acts than they are preoccupied with the historical record.
  63. The Act of Killing
    In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Viola
    In essentially offering up The Twelfth Night as a hazy Shakespearean mash-up, Viola isn't so much deeply disrespecting notions of ownership, authorship, etc., as charitably redefining them.
  65. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."
  66. Sightseers
    This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.
  67. Portrait of Jason (re-release)
    The film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting.
  68. Berberian Sound Studio
    On the surface, Peter Strickland's film is an amusing black comedy that parodies the horror movie's continual status as the cultural black sheep of the cinematic landscape, but the filmmaker is most prominently concerned with painting a sonic portrait of alienation.
  69. Augustine
    Alice Winocour's take on this true story carries the superficial trappings of a period drama, but its perspective is entirely contemporary.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Old Dog
    Minimalist in its aesthetics and soundtrack, quiet and deliberate in its plot, but nonetheless familiar--endearing and a vital addition to the small but growing Tibetan cinema.
  71. Bastards
    Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.
  72. The Immigrant
    In its stripped-down realism and blistering fixation on its main character's grappling with life and mortality, the film is kin to Roberto Rossellini's collaborations with Ingrid Bergman.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Only Lovers Left Alive
    As is so often the case in Jim Jarmusch's films, simply spending time in the company of his creations proves engrossing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Chungking Express
    To Wong, love isn't something you can talk about; words are inadequate, empty, inevitably reductive. Love is something you see, sense, feel, and Chungking Express is one of Wong's purest evocations of its excitement and heartbreak.
  75. Big Men
    No one corporation or person plans to trample over the wellbeing of the Ghanaian people, but as the story of the development progress, the breadth of Rachel Boynton's research shows how it will occur regardless.
  76. Godzilla
    In form, it's no wham-bam VFX sizzle reel replete with sputtering, ejaculatory climaxes. It's the magnificently sustained equivalent of Ravel's "Bolero," with nuclear warheads in place of timpani rolls.
  77. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    It ever so subtly zeros in on the extreme particularities of a remote place to find something universal, or at the very least easily comprehensible about despair.
  78. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
    Slavoj Žižek manages to explain some of Lacanian psychoanalysis's most inscrutable notions with disarming clarity and infectious urgency.
  79. Mother of George
    Beautiful, poetic, and hard-hitting without the use of excessive force and deeply layered with evolving and regional nuances of feminine experience
  80. Foxcatcher
    Of Bennett Miller's many directorial feats, his canniest is his depiction of the precariousness of bonds, and how those bonds can shift, drastically yet almost imperceptibly.
  81. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    By de-emphasizing politics in favor of humanitarianism, Danielle Gardner's work also suggests how Americans might yet unify even as the world around them threatens to tear itself apart.
  82. Concussion
    The near-imperceptible finesse of Abby's characterization reflects writer-director Stacie Passon's effortless, interesting mix of richness and economy.
  83. Let the Fire Burn
    An unnerving, all-archival account of Philadelphia citizens suddenly terrorized by the unchecked violence of rogue "law and order."
  84. At Berkeley
    Frederick Wiseman's At Berkeley isn't only a study of the contemporary American university, but, like all of the filmmaker's best documentaries, a wide-ranging inquiry into the larger institutions and contradictions that define life in the United States.
  85. These Birds Walk
    The filmmakers use a wide range of cinematic techniques to convey the tenuous environment in which their subjects find themselves.
  86. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters.
  87. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    A magnificently quizzical diagram of two ceaselessly inquiring minds in perfect tandem, like a raw X-ray of atomized creativity.
  88. Intolerance
    Likely the most influential film ever made.
  89. Cousin Jules
    It's a bit reductive in terms of a personal portrait, but this is a film that's not concerned with telling the story of a man, instead making him a representative symbol of a mostly bygone way of life, a reminder of both the fleeting nature of individual experience and the steady patterns of a broader human existence.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    City Lights
    The first great peak in City Lights, the boxing scene, may be the most brilliant single comedy sequence of his career, not least because of the participation of Hank Mann, who plays the Tramp’s Bluto-like opponent in the ring, and Eddie Baker, who plays the referee.
  91. Mad Max: Fury Road
    George Miller orchestrates the rubber-burning pandemonium with the illicit smirk of someone who knows he's giving us exactly what we want.
  92. Blackhat
    Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence.
  93. Miss Julie
    The film is no tearjerker, but it makes the stage play's hidebound, soul-baring pleasures mesmerizing on screen, and without copping to reductivism.
  94. Song to Song
    The film is about floating along on currents of uncertain desire and excitement, overthinking your own indulgence in these whims, and then sometime later on down the road, through no clear constellation of reasons, recognizing that a real human connection was squandered in the haze of all that self-exploration.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Maps to the Stars
    If the research that Cronenberg and Wagner engaged in for Maps to the Stars oftentimes appears more entomological than sociological, there's nonetheless a plaintive chord of melancholy that plays throughout the film.
  96. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The pleasure in watching the film becomes a linguistic one as Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart masterfully sharpen their words and hurl them at each other like projectiles out of a blowpipe.
  97. Mr. Turner
    An astute summation of Mike Leigh's glum view of humanity, but also a challenge to this disposition and his own pessimistic perspective.
  98. Omar
    What Omar best portrays are the limitations that result from having an occupation, and the fight to overthrow it, dominate a person's entire life.
  99. Happy Christmas
    Joe Swanberg's films have grown into a reliable relief from the competitive, dehumanizing freneticism of much of American culture, marked by an affirming and understated sense of decency.
  100. Whiplash
    The thrill of watching Fletcher and Neyman's fray unfold is intensified by Damien Chazelle's attention to the craft and challenge of musicianship.
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