Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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 6.4 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
view
per page
  1. How Green Was My Valley
    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.
  2. Azor
    With its elegantly restrained cinematography, exquisitely understated performances, and quietly sumptuous production design, Azor embodies the same well-mannered urbanity as its protagonist.
  3. Paddington 2
    A wilder, weirder, funnier, more heartfelt and eye-popping, and, above all, more fully realized representation of director Paul King’s eccentric sensibility.
  4. The Little Mermaid
    The Little Mermaid is the story of one packrat pre-tween princess whose undersea kingdom is only matched in depth by her remarkable sense of consumer-minded entitlement.
  5. City Hall
    Its provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Frederick Wiseman’s own.
  6. The Death of Stalin
    Armando Iannucci satirizes the manner in which political power is accorded to those who can mask cutthroat ambition behind an outward projection of bland inoffensiveness.
  7. Strangers on a Train
    Strangers on a Train is also simply a great thriller, yet another illustration of Hitchcock’s awe-inspiring ability to convey more with a single image than most directors can with minutes upon minutes of belabored set pieces.
  8. About Dry Grasses
    Above all, the film captures how easy it is to deposit too much hope on the few who represent dissent, or freedom, when one is trapped.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Hard Truths
    Even at its funniest, Hard Truths finds Marianne Jean-Baptiste channeling an anger that feels excruciatingly real.
  10. In Transit
    The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.
  11. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    The film is the finest balance yet of Martin McDonagh's bleak sense of humor and offbeat moral sincerity.
  12. Au Revoir les Enfants
    Part dream, part nightmare, the film vividly remembers a traumatic moment in time that cannot be forgotten.
  13. Things to Come
    The film is further confirmation of Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately devastating ear and touch as a filmmaker.
  14. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters.
  15. Train Dreams
    The film’s mythologizing is refreshingly measured, and it offers an appealingly earnest take on the American story.
  16. Winter Sleep
    Staring deep into the darkness of an apparently static character, Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.
  17. A Star Is Born
    Bradley Cooper understands that a message is only as resonant as its messenger, so he surrounds himself with collaborators, old and new, who can sell even the hoariest cliché.
  18. Citizenfour
    Laura Poitras teaches by example, providing a privileged insight into Edward Snowden's personality and motivation while keeping the focus on government spying.
  19. Hamilton
    The show offers testimony to the power of communal storytelling, just as mighty on screen as on stage.
  20. The Father
    The film approximates the dislocation of its main character’s mind with a frighteningly slippery ease.
  21. Foxtrot
    Icy absurdism and sorrowful ironies abound throughout Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot, whose laughs stick in your throat like the silent screams of its Job-like protagonist.
  22. Sweet Country
    The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.
  23. Leave No Trace
    In Leave No Trace, director Debra Granik continues to refine a style of tranquil intensity. The film's images have a rapt and pared-down power, with emphases that are never quite where you expect them to be.
  24. Fargo
    Fargo, more than any of the Coens’ other work, is a study in contrast, namely in the sense that it’s made by two people who were clearly at one time insiders, but who have now taken the opportunity to see the Midwestern template from the outside. As such, every interaction in the film registers as a direct reflection of incongruous elements and repressed tensions.
  25. Parallel Mothers
    The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Pedro Almodóvar understands to be one in the same.
  26. Hell or High Water
    As with Sicario, the broad strokes of the film's Southwestern stereotypes gradually sharpen into focus as the story pivots to a look at the systemic forces that shape the characters.
  27. Shirkers
    Sandi Tan's view of what the original Shirkers represented, and what her new film should be, proves surprisingly expansive.
  28. Mildred Pierce
    Though its craft is accomplished, the film never gets deep under one’s skin the way it ought to.
  29. 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.
  30. Tootsie
    The film, as a whole, isn’t quite up to the phenomenal dexterity of its lead’s exertions. But there’s a legitimate reason people love this movie so much: Pollack syphoned Hoffman’s ecstatic electricity off into a popular and old-fashioned romantic-comedy formula, bringing it back to life. Tootsie is a remarkably gentle and human pop movie that informs the term “escapism” with an almost cleansing sense of decency.
    • 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.
  32. Aquarius
    Aquarius is a critique of a daydream that has the imaginative daring to live that very dream anyway.
  33. 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.
  34. Slow Machine
    The film navigates a tricky space between pathos and absurdity and often turns on a dime from one to the other.
  35. 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.
  36. Black Panther
    Michel B. Jordan plays Erik Killmonger with such moving, occasionally gut-wrenching commitment that it nearly mitigates the goofiness of his moniker and the superficiality of the film in toto.
  37. Cemetery of Splendor
    It gently and often imperceptibly shifts between past and present, legend and modernity, wakefulness and reverie.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bridge on the River Kwai
    Whereas Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago feel more pictorial than cinematic, The Bridge on the River Kwai carefully builds its psychological tension until it erupts in a blinding flash of sulfur and flame.
  39. Brooklyn
    The allure of the road not taken and Saoirse Ronan's performance exert a powerful pull.
  40. Mary Poppins
    The “Whistle While You Work” residue of domestic slavery that colors “A Spoonful of Sugar” aside, Mary Poppins is basically Long Day’s Journey Into Matriarchy (cathartic for some, terrifying for others).
  41. Faces
    Cassavetes didn’t improvise, and Faces was scripted, but many of the film’s scenes still have the feel of conversations happening right in front of you, with all the imperfections and digressions and looseness of the everyday.
  42. Good Morning
    This profound film reveals that nothing is below the purview of existential contemplation, even all matters of flatulence, and words as simple as “Good morning” are revealed to contain fathomless multitudes.
  43. Newtown
    Its enervated address of both mental-health treatment and gun laws receives few constructive articulations beyond a single scene.
  44. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.
  45. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    It places regurgitated ideas into the mouths of gifted actors, then drops them amid a kooky story that plays like an elaborate distraction from what little the film actually has to say.
  46. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Out 1 is largely a film of conversation, as its prolonged rehearsal vignettes regularly give way to even lengthier scenes of verbal self-analysis.
  47. The Awful Truth
    The Awful Truth is a perfect farce, devoid of any fat, in which Lucy and Jerry’s fantasies and schemes topple after one another like figurative dominoes.
  48. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    Richard E. Grant is captivating on his own, but his rapport with Melissa McCarthy is so effortless that their characters’ conversations offer deeper pleasures than the main plot of the film.
  49. Wolfwalkers
    The storyline’s edges are frayed just enough to give it the gentle distance of a tale recalled though the gauze of myth and memory.
  50. It Happened One Night
    Even now, It Happened One Night carries the unmistakable tenor of a breakout hit, fueled by confidently zippy repartee and manic comic invention that almost none of the innumerable pretenders to the throne of romantic comedy can match.
    • 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.
  52. Happy Hour
    Hamaguchi arranges most sequences around a handful of static, roomy medium shots that subtly suggest emotional dynamics through camera and actor positioning.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    My Neighbor Totoro
    It’s a film that proves time and again that life itself is the grandest, most galvanizing of all dramas.
  54. The Missing Picture
    Paramount to molding a narrative of war and totalitarianism, however, is the inventive aesthetic in which Panh frames his memoir: a hypnotic hybrid of bleak archival footage, thoughtful voiceover, tone-dictating music, and—most significantly—homemade clay-figurine dioramas.
  55. Of Men and War
    A work of astounding sensitivity and precision, it argues for emotional honesty as a moral and psychic imperative.
  56. The Long Goodbye
    The film is simultaneously an act of revisionism as well as a parody of then-revitalizing neo-noir.
  57. Imitation of Life
    The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.
  58. Pain and Glory
    Pedro Almodóvar’s latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned intensity of his finest work.
  59. Genèse (Genesis)
    Lesage pulls focus onto the aftershocks of trauma rather than the traumatic events themselves.
  60. Eraserhead
    Eraserhead is an extraordinarily raw film that’s not so much an announcement of its filmmaker’s obsessions, but a complete, intimate, and heartbreaking fulfillment of them.
  61. Return to Seoul
    Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul quickly blooms as a study in contrasts, sublimely juxtaposing character and culture.
  62. The Velvet Underground
    Todd Haynes’s documentary excitingly captures an era’s explosion of creativity, one that bespoke new and challenging kinds of freedom.
  63. All That Breathes
    Shaunak Sen’s documentary is both otherworldly and humanizing, as if it were bridging a gap between different forms of existence.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Medium Cool
    Medium Cool stages, not so much with voguish nihilism, despite its demonstrably downbeat ending, as dispassionate vérité straightforwardness, the growing pains that strain a nation when the countercultural ideal of limitless possibility matures into something closer to political reality.
  65. In the Mood for Love
    In the Mood For Love is ravishing beyond mortal words.
  66. Mulholland Dr.
    Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.
  67. Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea initiates a narrative that probes the fundamental gap between wanting to help and actually being able to do so.
  68. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    As in Rogue Nation, Fallout‘s action scenes are cleanly composed and easy to follow, and so abundant as to become monotonous.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery.
  70. Cléo from 5 to 7
    Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early-’60s Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard’s Breathless.
  71. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    In his final role, Chadwick Boseman meticulously charts the breakdown of a man discovering, within the mirages of 1920s blackness, that pursuit and escape, fleeing from and running toward, are inextricably intertwined.
  72. Level Five
    Level Five pictorializes the cruel moment when curiosity encounters tragedy, and the all-too-human abandonment of interest that can follows.
  73. Robot Dreams
    Pablo Berger's film effortlessly brings a sense of universality to its story.
  74. Descendant
    With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic.
  75. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    On the Seventh Day brings a certain levity to wrenching matters of daily survival by thoroughly humanizing its characters, thus preventing them from feeling as if they're being written as stand-ins for thematic ideas.
  76. Walk Up
    With each new film, Hong Sang-soo’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier.
  77. We Are the Best!
    Lukas Moodysson's film allows its trio of girls to express themselves through gender, certainly, but not undermine their desire to be heard as artists first.
  78. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Martin Scorsese culls various images together to offer a startlingly intense vision of America as place that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, essentially believes in nothing, following one demoralizing crisis after another.
  79. About Endlessness
    Rather than eliciting surprise and wonder, Roy Andersson channels his full stylistic arsenal in search of something far more delicate: a recognition of the sublime in the prosaic.
  80. 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.
  81. 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.
  82. Nomadland
    By juxtaposing beautiful vistas filled with promise, a rotted social safety net, and the scrappy itinerant workers navigating the space in between, Zhao generates a gradually swelling tension underneath her film’s somewhat placid surface.
  83. Hope
    Maria Sødahl’s considers the extreme emotions provoked by a medical emergency with an impressive force of clarity.
  84. My Journey Through French Cinema
    Bertrand Tavernier's exquisite documentary consistently avoids mere hagiography by looking to the films themselves.
  85. About Elly (2009)
    Asghar Farhadi's sensibility embodies a combination of empathy and paranoia that's striking considering that the latter is normally driven by self-absorption.
  86. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    True to its title, Marielle Heller's adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical novel has the loosely structured, unfiltered feel of a young person's diary.
  87. 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.
  88. Elena
    Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.
  89. All Is Lost
    J.C. Chandor creates an austere snapshot of human struggle, ingenuity, and perseverance, one that's predicated on Robert Redford's fantastic performance.
  90. The Banshees of Inisherin
    As dark as things get, the film never abandons its sly sense of humor.
  91. Love & Friendship
    No Austen adaptation, even the most revisionist ones, have ever felt as vicious as Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship.
  92. Hereditary
    In writer-director Ari Aster's smugly agitating feature debut, the devil is certainly in the hackneyed details.
  93. Listen to Me Marlon
    Among the film's many revelations is the level of self-aware humility Brando exudes while talking about his life and creative process.
  94. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Rugano Nyoni’s critique of her native country’s gender-based discrimination is as acerbic as it is unforgiving.
  95. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Radiating a startling intensity, the film demands to be reckoned with.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Odd Man Out
    Odd Man Out is indeed a character study wrapped in the guise of a sociopolitical thriller, and a work which accordingly plays better when accentuating the moral and personal complexities of the former through the aesthetic prism of the latter, shedding the weight of topical investment even as the shadows of its influence hang literally and figuratively on the film’s dramatic landscape.
  97. 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    Comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick and Julie Dash are inevitable, but Raven Jackson’s search for the sublime lacks both the rich philosophical inquiries of the former and the dense, lived-in specificity of the latter.
  99. Rose
    Freudians will have a field day with Markus Schleinzer’s 17th-century-set folk tale.
    • 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »