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. The Babadook
    Its horrors go beyond any single raggedy phantom, reaching back to the primordial fear of death and loss: of a child, of a loved one, of one's own sense of self.
  2. Land Ho!
    That the filmmakers consistently catch the nuances of character that bind the two men to each other, rather than simply tracing the pros and cons of their dispositions, is what gives the film its melancholic yet vibrant resonance.
  3. Crimson Peak
    Guillermo del Toro's fussiest, most compartmentalized construction, filled with the most powerful sense of repression and delusion.
  4. Starred Up
    The cautious optimism with which it answers questions about rehabilitation and forgiveness is credible because the characters and setting feel so thoroughly authentic.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    It represents some of the first and most essential steps into a new age of filmmaking.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Foreign Correspondent
    Where the film separates itself from the director’s other early studio work and, indeed, many films of the period, is in its ambition and scope of its production. The aforementioned set pieces are not only memorable, they’re among the most impressively mounted action sequences to that point.
  7. It Felt Like Love
    Eliza Hittman's film captures the exclusive properties of sex with a degree of intimacy and empathy that, at times, feels authentically revelatory.
  8. Show Boat
    A surprisingly nuanced, if at times woefully dated, attempt to depict the complexities of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified as the problem of the 20th century: the color line.
  9. Himizu
    Sion Sono's film is a vision of coming of age as trial by fire, a thunderous encapsulation of that period of transition in which adolescents try to discover themselves: their passions, their purpose, their sense of morality.
  10. Fort Tilden
    It elegantly evolves from an absurdist comedy into a remarkably wounded and uprooted story of friends who're beginning to tire of their shared social cocoons.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    Kurosawa most often did his finest work when combining his idiosyncratic and popular sensibilities into humane, broadly accessible entertainments; it just so happens that The Hidden Fortress remains more unabashedly entertaining than most.
  12. Tom at the Farm
    Its allegory for internalized homophobia, a gay man's perilous attraction to straightness itself, seems in this case deeply persona.
  13. Policeman
    Israel's fractured psyche is plumbed via narrative splintering in Policeman, Nadav Lapid's compelling drama about his homeland's burgeoning social unrest.
  14. The King of Escape
    Cruising for Alain Guiraudie seems to be the way of nature, a drive that doesn't discriminate.
  15. The King and the Mockingbird
    If the film were to propose a mandate for animation, it would be what the medium's etymology has longed suggested: to make the inanimate full of life.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Soft in the Head
    Nathan Silver captures the young-adult experience, particularly the agony of first sexual pangs, in films that deftly mix beguilement and repulsion.
  17. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
    We're simply presented a person in trouble, and we're allowed to recognize his problems as extreme embodiments of universal issues of terror, confusion, and loneliness.
  18. Welcome to New York
    The film's peculiarly exhilarating effect can be attributed to a sense of social outrage that's transcended for the sake of metaphoric social clarity.
  19. 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.
  20. Amour Fou
    Jessica Hausner is less interested in historical revisionism than mining this real-life tragedy for its existential thrust.
  21. Jauja
    Other films of this ilk use widescreen composition to highlight a terrifying existential void, but these cramped frames tend to produce the nutty energy of cabin fever.
  22. National Gallery
    In the style of an ambling, yet entirely focused visitor, the film continually circles back to pictures, protagonists, and situations to furnish them with new meanings, alter their perception, or even directly challenge their previous presentation.
  23. Leviathan
    Andrey Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus.
  24. Coming Home
    Coming Home is a film in which everyone's dreams are irrevocably broken, the pieces too small to grasp, let alone pick up.
  25. Force Majeure
    It comes down on the essential hollowness of traditional gender roles like the avalanche that proves to be its inciting event.
  26. See You Next Tuesday
    The film is uproariously funny, but its laughs don't come with an aftertaste of cynicism so much as they are the aftertaste of cynicism.
  27. Northern Light
    The film has an atmosphere of endless experimentation, which compliments the constant revision the subjects apply to their lives in the wake of their economic insecurity.
  28. A Summer's Tale
    A Summer's Tale's linear structure and sense of observation is simple yet inspired.
  29. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    A dizzying hall-of-mirrors stunt, a horror remake as autobiographical X-ray, and a work of fantasy that serves as a decadently cleansing creative exorcism.
  30. Closed Curtain
    The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.
  31. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Mitra Farahani rescues the doc from becoming a talking-head fest by embracing her creative self as a character and exposing the travails of her own authorship process.
  32. Silence
    Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.
  33. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    Between their wildly different bodies of work, a shared appeal emerges: to stop, look, listen, and consider not just what's in front of you, but also where it came from and where it might be going.
  34. Cheatin'
    The plot is pure pulp, inspired in equal parts by the tropes and imagery of film noir, grand opera, and silent melodrama.
  35. American Sniper
    Clint Eastwood startlingly grips the audience with his sense of hypnotic silence, which carries suggestions of what might be termed politically apolitical pragmatism.
  36. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The soft colors, graceful movements, and clean lines together embody the ineffable beauty of life on Earth that is one of the film's main themes.
  37. The Naked Room
    By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.
  38. Life of Riley
    Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.
  39. All That Jazz
    All That Jazz may be Fosse’s finest cinematic achievement.
  40. The Duke of Burgundy
    Peter Strickland charges full-tilt into the objectifying whims of his fantasies in order to somehow reach the other end of perception, which acknowledges the ultimate empathetic limitations of said fantasies.
  41. Pasolini
    Biopics ascribe titanic importance to a subject's every gesture, but Ferrara stresses the reality of creation, of its ordinary activities that nonetheless give an artist a sense of fulfillment.
  42. Hellaware
    Michael M. Bilandic deftly captures the arrogance and despair of New York artists in their efforts to succeed in a decadent world that forces them to produce inherently epigonic work.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
    The film becomes akin to variations on a theme, executed with visual finesse, and enhanced by its many rich textures.
  44. Citizenfour
    Laura Poitras teaches by example, providing a privileged insight into Edward Snowden's personality and motivation while keeping the focus on government spying.
  45. Merchants of Doubt
    An issues documentary that scores its points through a seductive combination of clearly stated arguments and pithy humor.
  46. What We Do in the Shadows
    The film sympathetically renders the small humiliations and inconveniences of life as an old-world vampire struggling with modernity.
  47. Flamenco, Flamenco
    It's as if Carlos Saura were calling the bluff of spectacle-oriented narrative cinema that necessitates excusing its excesses with characters and plotting.
  48. 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.
  49. Horse Money
    Costa's storytelling is illusory at best, but Horse Money's self-contradictions are communicated not via plot half as much as in scenography, even in the costuming.
  50. Tales of the Grim Sleeper
    Broomfield isn't so much dedicated to journalistic truth or social ethnography as he is displaying bodies and mindsets of individuals that complicate any sense of Manichean polemics, where good and evil must be reckoned with at a purely secular and corporeal level, particularly along the lines of class and gender.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Unfriended
    When the genre-film spectacle arrives, it's in full force, and the strictures of the framing device manage to amplify, rather than suppress, the impact of the shocks and scares.
  52. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    At once a microcosmic expression of frustration and another of auto-critique, When Evening Falls devilishly recalls and riffs on seemingly shapeless conversations between its very small ensemble of characters without succumbing to soporific navel-gazing.
  53. Something, Anything
    The film turns what at first seemingly appears as Kodak moments into a study of a soul in transition.
  54. La Última Película
    The film isn't so much about "the end of cinema" as it is about the people who abuse the medium and their subjects for their own political agenda.
  55. Effie Gray
    It spins the narrative of one of the Victorian art world's most mysterious marriages into a study of life lived and life merely examined, a fecund fairy tale in reverse.
  56. Salvation Army
    It's a quiet thud of a film, which embraces, with grace and precision, the nastiness of growing up with desire stuck in one's throat like a muffled scream.
  57. 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.
  58. The D Train
    The film uses its male-on-male boundary-leaping to give the shopworn man-boy narrative a refresh.
  59. Results
    Andrew Bujalski seizes upon physical training as a resonant metaphor for the work and risk that are inherent in cultivating significant interpersonal connections.
  60. City of Gold
    The film affectively defends food critic Jonathan Gold's assertion that it's ultimately cooking that makes us human.
  61. Digging for Fire
    Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.
  62. Entertainment
    It conjures a menacing perspective on how the titular occupation hulls out empathy and cultivates a particularly unsettling strain of cynicism.
  63. 1971
    Johanna Hamilton's 1971 represents a mind-blowing scoop disguised as a fairly garden-variety issue doc.
  64. Love & Friendship
    No Austen adaptation, even the most revisionist ones, have ever felt as vicious as Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship.
  65. Poltergeist
    Poltergeist's most canny conceit is how it takes the concept of a haunted house—up to that point a gothic, remote icon (you practically had to accept a dare and then drive halfway across the state to ever find yourself in one)—and plops it in the middle of the most mundane of all possible locations: American suburbia.
  66. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    The courtroom's cramped, near-featureless air of bureaucratic stagnation becomes oppressive even for the audience, making it easy to identify with Viviane's growing hunger for freedom.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Welcome to Me
    The film rejects a fawning (or even particularly detailed) account of mental illness in favor of a plunge into the deep end of a bottomless ego.
  68. Approaching the Elephant
    The film's 90 minutes are a disorienting cyclone of destructive incidents and propulsive energy.
  69. Eastern Boys
    A ferocious plea for character salvation within a milieu where money and bodily affect are the raison d'être for human existence.
  70. The Lesson
    The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.
  71. Rebels of the Neon God
    Tsai Ming-liang's debut makes one yearn for an alternative reality where it, not Pulp Fiction, became the beacon of '90s independent filmmaking.
  72. Iris
    Albert Maysles's portrait of Iris Apfel gradually emerges with cathartic clarity without compromising her inherent mystery.
  73. The Nightmare
    As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.
  74. Uncertain Terms
    Appropriately, the images in the film, the most fluidly beautiful and resonant of Nathan Silver's career thus far, suggest flashes of memory relived from the vantage point of the future.
  75. The Measure of a Man
    It exhibits the spry subtlety of Jean and Luc Dardenne's films, and, consequently, it's possible that it will be similarly mistaken for a work of “naturalism.”
  76. The Assassin
    The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.
  77. Land and Shade
    The landscape seems to push the characters away at the same time that it anchors them into place, suggesting that elsewhere is a promise that only dreams can keep.
  78. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    A barbed inquiry into this particular notion of "self-defense," enabled by the quotidian racism state and perpetuated de jure by the state.
  79. The Princess of France
    The distinctiveness of Matías Piñeiro's alluring brand of formalism lies in this deference to chance and alchemy.
  80. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.
  81. I Touched All Your Stuff
    A documentary whatsit acutely aware of the inherent performance people put into social discourse to maintain appearances.
  82. Chi-Raq
    A Spike Lee joint in the urgent sociopolitical register of Radio Raheem's boombox—a call to arms that's also a call to disarm.
  83. Everybody Wants Some!!
    Richard Linklater's film luxuriates in a world that's the platonic ideal of youthful indulgence.
  84. Room
    The film, never sensational or saccharine, is a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.
  85. Metropolitan
    Metropolitan celebrates and mourns the specific character of a place and time, youthful associations and crushes, a toolkit of values, even if those values are not exactly shared by, say, housewives in Duluth and auto mechanics in Albuquerque.
  86. Baby Driver
    Baby Driver literalizes Edgar Wright’s fascination with people’s emotional overreliance on pop culture as a cover for arrested development.
  87. Barbie
    The film is at once a journey of self-actualization and a testament to female solidarity.
  88. Prince
    It revives hope for a pop-art cinema that's capable of treating characters like actual human beings rather than pawns on a chess board.
  89. Heart of a Dog
    Laurie Anderson condenses contemporary, human experience to the point where exterior and interior are made indistinguishable from one another.
  90. De Palma
    Like Hitchcock, De Palma reveals himself to be guided by an unusual mixture of intuition and intellectualization.
  91. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Spotting and processing the countless differences between the parts offers pleasures on various levels.
  92. From Afar
    The film renders visible a very complicated, and awfully repressed, truth not only about gay desire, but desire in general.
  93. Neon Bull
    Everything in the film is understood to be a subsumed sex act, with actual sex serving as a contextualizing catharsis.
  94. The Treasure
    The Treasure is no thriller, but there are moments here that inculcate the stakes with prisoner's-dilemma paranoia.
  95. Insiang (1976)
    Lino Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment channels its melodrama through the filter of neorealism.
  96. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
    That plot gives you an idea of how casually insane this movie is, but if you’re able to radically suspend your disbelief (the story is an illogical shambles), the film offers a number of modest pleasures.
  97. Of Men and War
    A work of astounding sensitivity and precision, it argues for emotional honesty as a moral and psychic imperative.
  98. In the Basement
    Cinema hasn't been this close to the dusty cogs of desire's machinery and unapologetic about pleasure since Pasolini.
  99. Only Yesterday (1991)
    It uses the trappings of the family melodrama to reveal the subtle social constraints that inhibit people, particularly women, from attaining full self-realization.
  100. No Home Movie
    By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.
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