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 6.4 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
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  1. Mutiny on the Bounty
    For Lloyd, Thalberg, and the writers, the point of the film was to tell a compelling story and, like the Bounty’s inebriated physician creating various tall tales to explain his wooden leg, facts and meanings ultimately just got in their way of crafting a great entertainment.
  2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    With its fine-tuned comic timing and feeling of constant action, Into the Spider-Verse is downright invigorating, and that’s evident even before it gets to its dazzling, dimensional-colliding climax.
  3. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    What’s absent here is the murderous lust for power that dovetails with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s lust for each other, and which proves their mutual undoing.
  4. Particle Fever
    The film may not put itself above the uninitiated, but director Mark Levinson oftentimes appears almost too eager to present his material with affectation.
  5. Flow
    Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.
  6. Life Itself
    There's a sense throughout of Steve James rushing and dutifully covering all his bases to evade accusations of creating a puff piece.
  7. The Shape of Water
    The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.
  8. 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.
  9. Bisbee '17
    The film's epic canvas invigorates Robert Greene, who fuses a procedural documentary, in the key of Frederick Wiseman’s films, with tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror western.
  10. Moneyball
    True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.
  11. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    Manages to be intimate and impersonal at the same time, a trait constantly reinforced by his portrayal of not only Ceausescu but the populace he led, represented, and controlled for nearly three decades.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Brief Encounters is great entertainment.
  13. Resurrection
    At times, Resurrection seems to outright taunt viewers for trying to make sense of it all.
  14. 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.
  15. The Tsugua Diaries
    The Tsugua Diaries is something like Memento for an age of isolation and listlessness.
  16. My Golden Days
    Arnaud Desplechin tries his hand at a coming-of-age tale, and does so with equal doses of mature reflection and youthful impetuosity.
  17. Force Majeure
    It comes down on the essential hollowness of traditional gender roles like the avalanche that proves to be its inciting event.
  18. Good One
    The film instinctively and lucidly shows how sometimes a coming of age can be thrust upon a person against their will.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Tampopo
    At bottom, Itami’s film is a zesty, albeit wholesomely satisfying, concoction concerned with the virtues of community and cooperation. Nonetheless, Tampopo also explores some darker regions in a number of vignettes that illuminate the often surreal intersections of sex, death, and other human appetites.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blow Out
    Blow Out is not known as one of Brian De Palma’s horror movies, but of all his films, it’s the one that feels most like a nightmare.
  21. Diane
    Every moment in Jones’s film is so precisely textured that it becomes fantastical.
  22. The Magician
    This piquant control over cinematic grammar doesn’t quite rescue the film from a laughably zombie-tinged climax and an anomalous deus ex machina denouement, but it makes The Magician one of Bergman’s more accessible failures, and collapses any suspicious connection between him and the fretful Vogler.
  23. Point Blank
    Though Point Blank is rife with existential malaise, it is also one of the most ferociously sexy crime movies ever made.
  24. Tangerine
    Its triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as its main character's electric sense of shade.
  25. To Be or Not to Be
    Many of the film’s pleasures, then, derive from watching these characters successfully use the tools of the stage (improvisation, sense memory, prosthetics) to successfully subvert the Nazis.
  26. Room
    The film, never sensational or saccharine, is a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.
  27. An Elephant Sitting Still
    The film’s gritty, mundane agonies come to feel like a series of moral tests with genuinely unpredictable outcomes.
  28. The Wolf House
    The film’s animation leans into its most jerky, artificial qualities, all the better to enhance the atmosphere of bizarre unreality.
  29. Anatomy of a Fall
    At its best, Anatomy of a Fall is nothing less than a rigorous modern treatise on the knotty interpersonal dynamics of long-term relationships and how conveniently they can be distorted when exposed to public scrutiny.
  30. Nebraska
    In the film, Alexander Payne's overview of America is extraordinarily, multifariously profound.
  31. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    It achieves the rarest of feats of any tentpole Hollywood release, animated or not: gleefully matching exhilarating stylistic experimentation with a multi-tiered narrative of equal ambition.
  32. 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.
  33. Black Narcissus
    Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
  34. Hard Boiled
    There’s a moral “quality” to the bloodshed that you won’t find in your average Hollywood action film.
  35. Last Days in Vietnam
    For American viewers who don't know, the doc will be a worthy footnote to a long bout of deliberate cultural amnesia, but it's too telling that the Vietnamese remain in the background.
  36. Krisha
    It rams home the main character's relentless downward spiral though an incessant parade of grandstanding stylistic flourishes.
  37. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    Throughout, direcgor Bill Morrison mixes documentarian detail with an ecstatic sense of poetry.
  38. Shadows
    At 80 minutes, its cinematic flash fiction, and a suitable entry point into the lively body of work Cassavetes made.
  39. Rebecca
    A key film in Alfred Hitchcock’s evolution as a master explorer of sexual neuroses.
  40. Josephine
    Beth de Araújo’s sophomore feature is a harrowing chronicle of a premature maturation.
  41. The Inheritance
    The film’s throwback nature is in sync with Ephraim Asili’s interest in wanting to keep the legacy of black activism alive.
  42. 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.
  43. Little Men
    Director Ira Sachs transforms the smallest blip on life's radar, a childhood friendship, into a momentous occasion.
  44. Welcome to Chechnya
    David France’s most remarkable accomplishment emerges from an aesthetic commitment of a very particular kind.
  45. The Great Escape
    The Great Escape is that rare war film that doesn’t fully indulge in assumed nationalism, save for the fact that everyone speaks English. Sturges never touches on the essential hollowness and cruel pageantry of war, but he does the next best thing by depicting an international effort where victory, no matter how short-lived, depends on the cooperation of myriad talents, rather than the gruff can-do attitude of an unbreakable chosen one.
  46. What Now? Remind Me
    The repetitive rhythms of Joaquim Pinto's daily routines provide the film with a feeling of serenity that stands in contrast to the man's underlying anxiety.
  47. Manakamana
    Filmmakers Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez insist that altered spectatorship, particularly patience and duration, is the foundation of cinematic edification.
  48. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    The film is less a portrait of one martyred man than a mosaic of a resistant community.
  49. Carrie
    Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley whales across Nancy Allen’s face.
  50. The Red Turtle
    A pointed simplicity governs Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle, one that’s traditional of many survival tales.
  51. 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.
  52. My Happy Family
    It casually lays out the domestic space where the story’s events takes place with acutely detailed cultural specificity.
  53. Chasing Coral
    What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.
  54. Loveless
    One feels in the film's punishing bleakness a yearning for transcendence.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Showing Up
    Deftly, Showing Up leaves unresolved the familial, creative, professional, and interpersonal matters at its core, staying true to its vision of an artistic environment perpetually caught between modest comfort and precariousness.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Barbara
    Most compelling in Christian Petzold's latest is the way the filmmaker adeptly conducts his tides of Cold War paranoia.
  57. Bonnie and Clyde
    Though Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.
  58. I Saw the TV Glow
    The film is a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    May December
    The film examines real-world events through the lens of mass media with a wry humor that masks profoundly complex and painful undercurrents of emotion.
  60. Maidan
    It puts the viewer inside Maidan, allowing them to draw their own conclusions about the ideas and agendas espoused by the movement's leaders and participants.
  61. Drug War
    The film is a singularly huge, relentless, all-encompassing set piece that mutates and spasms with terrifying lack of foresight. It's all business, business, business.
  62. The Great Beauty
    Paolo Sorrentino's film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.
  63. Cover-Up
    Cover-Up is a sweeping, if tempered, tribute to investigative journalism, attesting to its enduring importance at a time when resources for it have substantially declined.
  64. April
    April’s frames seek to embody a dizzying span of human experience, even if Dea Kulumbegashvili occasionally strains to corral it.
  65. Vitalina Varela
    At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.
  66. Happening
    This period drama manages the difficult task of speaking to our current moment without being didactic or preachy.
  67. The Human Surge 3
    While its globe-trotting sense of wonder shows the joys of offline existence to be as profound and vivid as they ever were, its simultaneous sense of boundless possibility and stagnant futility recalls nothing so much as the chaotic, alienating realm of cyberspace that both birthed and shaped it.
  68. The Lost Daughter
    For a while, Olivia Colman’s expressive performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness.
  69. The Big Sick
    The film is always at least gut-rumbling and keeps its humor in situations that are morose and awkward.
  70. Argo
    Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Summer Hours
    It’s a testament to Assayas’s empathy that he is able to build the entirety of his drama in the distance between his principals’ forgivable self-interest and their quiet kindness.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Master
    The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson with the edges sanded off, the best bits shorn down to nubs.
  73. The Wild Pear Tree
    Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual.
  74. My Imaginary Country
    By the end of My Imaginary Country, Guzmán has still not moved past the trauma of history. Nor, he suggests, has Chile. Not yet. But he does leave open the possibility of a future not beholden to that trauma and a nation that might now be able to write a new history for itself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. One of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades.
  76. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    The plaintive plain-spokenness of the interviewees, the way they matter-of-factly speak of atrocity, is transcendent and intensely haunting.
  77. Aladdin
    Aladdin is ultimately less offensive than patently ridiculous, mostly because its ethnic white noise is really just an excuse for Robin Williams—as a postmodern blabbermouthed genie who grants Aladdin three wishes—to put on the most elaborate, narcissistic circus act in the history of cinema.
  78. Sentimental Value
    The film’s multi-layered structure supports a familiar but often profoundly affecting tale of intergenerational family conflict.
  79. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling.
  80. City of Ghosts
    The director’s apparently frank and intimate relationships with the RBSS’s heroic journalists help sustain City of Ghosts‘s undeniable urgency, which culminates in a final image of appropriate, irresolvable anguish.
  81. Springtime in a Small Town
    The film exudes a sense of fleetingness; however static these lives may be, Tian's narrative perfectly evokes a changing season.
  82. The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is so perfectly tailored to the star that it could’ve been mapped out from a Pythagorean theorem.
  83. Strong Island
    Yance Ford’s film builds into an emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically complex work of essay and memoir.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Interrupters
    An inspirational and heartbreaking nail-biter, The Interrupters was more difficult for me to watch than any battle documentary I've seen in years.
  85. Ernest & Célestine
    It's in the way the film refuses to characterize its central friendship solely on the grounds of common isolation that becomes its most endearing quality.
  86. Only Angels Have Wings
    The other reason why Hawks's film can't be approached as a pure sociological interrogation is that it's, quite visibly, a Hollywood production with certain inescapable commitments to entertainment convention. This isn't to downgrade the movie, though, as there's a reason why Hawks and other Old Hollywood filmmakers have become so revered.
  87. First Reformed
    After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and skepticism that’s as reverent as it is blasphemous.
  88. Milla
    Valérie Massadian's Milla begins with a stylistic bait-and-switch that neatly summarizes the film's overall sense of formal balance.
  89. Z
    Forty years on, it’s still an eye-catching, fast-paced watch, but the plaudits it won as an uncompromising thriller and landmark cinema seem as shaky as the film’s villainous military officers’ insistence that its central murder was an accident.
  90. The American Sector
    The film accomplishes a restoration of sorts, allowing us to see how historical objects can confer meaning on a new context.
  91. Baby Driver
    Baby Driver literalizes Edgar Wright’s fascination with people’s emotional overreliance on pop culture as a cover for arrested development.
  92. A Little Prayer
    The film patiently illustrates how places imprint themselves upon us and guide our actions.
  93. Sabaya
    The film’s terseness could make it too cryptic for some, but that doesn’t blunt the impact of its most visceral or tender moments.
    • 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.
  95. Let the Fire Burn
    An unnerving, all-archival account of Philadelphia citizens suddenly terrorized by the unchecked violence of rogue "law and order."
  96. The Juniper Tree
    The Juniper Tree’s peculiar pedigree as an American indie fueled by European arthouse tropes and constructed with a flair for the avant-garde and the handmade marks it as a welcome rediscovery.
  97. Persona
    Despite its elaborate meta-game-playing, which has had a pronounced and unquantifiable influence on film culture, Persona remains intensely alive and intimate.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Desire
    When Dietrich sings the Friedrich Hollander/Leo Robin song “Awake In A Dream” to Cooper, her purring, off-key voice envelops us in a world of addictive movie fantasy, presided over by two very different masters locked in a tantalizing creative affair.
  99. One Fine Morning
    The film’s storytelling is deceptively straightforward, rooted in realistic dialogue and Mia Hansen-Løve’s light touch as a visual stylist.
  100. 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.
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