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. Blue Film
    On the whole, Blue Film’s raw, skin-crawling interrogations of aberrant sexuality and trauma ring fearless and true.
  2. My Father's Shadow
    Hope and fear are inextricably bound in Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical film.
  3. A Real Pain
    The film is levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance.
  4. Walkabout
    Roeg shoots every figure in the film like an instructional visual subject, and it levels the philosophical playing field—whether man, or ant, or echidna, or gnarled tree stump, they’re all fodder for the experimental interplay of light, shadow, and space.
  5. Atlantics
    As Mati Diop mourns Senegal’s lost men, she honors their grief and affords them tremendous power all at once.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    The film's vision of masculine self-sufficiency is built around--and on, via Australia's own bloody colonial history--an elemental violence.
  7. The Green Knight
    A methodical, if largely allegorical, exploration of its main character’s psyche, the film smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of its source material.
  8. The First Wave
    Matthew Heineman’s documentary successfully emphasizes how people’s emotions were whipsawed by an unprecedented crisis.
  9. Five Easy Pieces
    Bob Rafelson directs in an exploratory manner that naturally syncs up with Nicholson’s intuitive performance, his formalism suggesting a fusion of vérité and expressionism.
  10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn't just flattery, it's an indication of his method.
  11. Take Shelter
    It's not easy to give a character study concerning mental illness the aspect of a psychological thriller without some notes of exploitation or trivialization creeping in, and Take Shelter makes a few missteps.
  12. The Salesman
    Asghar Farhadi's film yields a tonal and emotional friction that's simultaneously tragic, transcendent, and comic.
  13. Afternoons of Solitude
    In the absence of any overt commentary, the film’s more open-ended choices in editing and music take on added significance.
  14. Dahomey
    Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage.
  15. Get Out
    Throughout Get Out, Jordan Peele incisively probes the connection between liberal racism and good old-fashioned white supremacy.
  16. West Side Story
    Steven Spielberg's West Side Story is at its best when it zooms in and settles down into character study.
  17. California Split
    Altman’s disgruntled comedy California Split, aside from its typically busy soundtrack (it was the first movie Altman used eight-channel audio to capture all the dialogue), seems a relatively straightforward buddy film...it’s also an anti-buddy parable in which George Segal and Elliott Gould’s homosocial behavior is equated unflatteringly against their obsessive gambling addictions.
  18. Song of the Sea
    Even as it entertains increasingly far-fetched detours, the film's folkloric narrative offers an ideal vehicle for this pictorial play.
  19. Amy
    For the most part, the documentary succeeds in conveying a galvanizing sense of what made Winehouse so immediately engaging.
  20. Fiume o morte!
    Igor Bezinović plays up the farcical side of history in Fiume o Morte!, his innovative docudrama retelling of Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s short-lived occupation of Rijeka, Croatia, in 1920.
  21. Birds of Passage
    Money corrupts, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s would say. Easy money corrupts completely.
  22. To the Ends of the Earth
    If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it’s because he’s focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior.
  23. Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China.
  24. The Treasure
    The Treasure is no thriller, but there are moments here that inculcate the stakes with prisoner's-dilemma paranoia.
  25. Stranger Things
    Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal's film is a tasteful, well-orchestrated drama that never reaches beyond its humble means.
  26. The Rider
    It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin.
  27. Wood and Water
    Jonas Bak’s semi-autobiographical film is a gentle depiction of modern alienation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Close Your Eyes
    Where once Victor Erice's films defined the unknown as a life not yet experienced, Close Your Eyes interprets it as a life already lived, slowly dissolving into memory.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Eighth Grade
    Throughout, we're invited to chuckle at the ironies of Kayla's hobbies and activities, but underlying such scenes is a strain of eeriness, as if the film were offering up a post-human spin on Pretty in Pink.
  31. The Novice
    At its best, the film suggests some kind of hellish Nike commercial, where “just do it” becomes less an inspirational motto than a grueling portent of doom.
  32. Girlhood
    Girlhood is so keyed to the minutiae of its teenage protagonists' lives, it's as if the film can't stop itself from behaving like they do.
  33. Kiki's Delivery Service
    Kiki presents a world of fantasy in such a genteel, unforced manner that it only seems ordinary and mundane. As such, it feels like a touchstone for all of Miyazaki’s later, even greater works of cartoon storytelling art.
  34. The Ornithologist
    The film revels in a hushed and lucid expressionist naturalism that’s reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Dorado
    Pangs of déjà vu might strike while watching El Dorado, as it’s a thinly-veiled remake of an earlier John Wayne film directed by Howard Hawks and co-written by Leigh Brackett for Warner Bros., 1959’s Rio Bravo. Though the stories are similar, El Dorado feels sharper, bolstered by Harold Rosson’s brilliant photography with scenes seemingly painted on celluloid.
  36. Sleeping Beauty
    Just as the film’s gorgeous backdrops suggest characters trapped in suspended animation, the many colorful balls of light that frequently circle their heads hauntingly convey the filmmakers’ idea of fate and love locked in a cosmic struggle.
  37. 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.
  38. Easy Rider
    This legendary tale of a motorcycle odyssey gone wrong remains timeless for its diagnosing of the early stages of a social ennui that has now fully bloomed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Quiet Man
    The Quiet Man remains one of the purest distillations of this charismatic filmmaker’s diverse artistic nature.
  40. Yes
    Nadav Lapid’s film locates a dire spiritual crisis facing the nation of his birth.
  41. April and the Extraordinary World
    The film provocatively has audiences see the world's current ecological concerns in a different and unexpected light.
  42. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    Order may be restored to the Circus, the "bad" elements weeded out, but in the jaundiced world the film has spent the last two hours so effectively delineating, the barriers between good and evil have been shown to be essentially meaningless.
  43. The Wild Robot
    The film’s discernible brushstrokes serve as a reminder of the literal hands, the labor, it takes to raise someone, mold them into a survivor, and to carry love with you wherever you go.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harakiri
    Structured with intricacy and precision, the storyline alternates between present and past, using its extended flashback sequences to delay and then detonate narrative revelations like so many time bombs.
  45. A Poet
    This finely shaded character study of a recalcitrant social pariah feels more than anything else like an existential parable.
  46. Support the Girls
    The film celebrates the unrecognized willpower and perseverance that undergirds low-wage service work in this country.
  47. Cat People
    This subtle, glancing trust in our ability to read the true story between the lines is pivotal to Cat People’s sense of being simultaneously vague and explicit, succinct yet freighted with baggage.
  48. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    The Fabulous Baker Boys ultimately soars on the strength of its three perfectly cast stars, who collectively wed studies of glamour (Jeff Bridges and Pfeiffer) with ruminations on the pain of life as an everyman among stars (Beau Bridges).
  49. Return to Homs
    The film is a testament to the power of video to document resistance to corrupt and abusive regimes, but it's also a witness to the limits of that power.
  50. The Asphalt Jungle
    Blood and trauma make an irresistible mix in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.
  51. Hero
    Hero is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering. Everything a wu xia should be…and then som
  52. Alcarràs
    As a tribute to farmers’ way of life, its effective and at times moving, but as an exposé of the potential losses that a business-centric green revolution is in the process of incurring, it wants for a stiffer punch.
  53. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    Hale County dwells on the beauty of the everyday as it recognizes the fragility of individual lives.
  54. The Taste of Things
    The film views the love of food and romance as all one singular desire for everything beautiful and fleeting in life.
  55. In Front of Your Face
    The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.
  56. Mudbound
    As striking as Mudbound's combat scenes are, they largely exist as setup for the postwar-set second half of the film, which scrutinizes the way that the atrocities witnessed in Europe laid bare the unsustainable hypocrisy in America's own bigoted divisions.
  57. Passing
    A sickened rage and psychological nuance courses through every meticulously arranged frame of the film.
  58. My Life as a Zucchini
    The film circumvents bleakness with a thoroughgoing commitment to understanding and intimacy.
  59. In the Same Breath
    In Wang Nanfu’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.
  60. Atlantis
    The film’s use of scale to drive home the absurdity of its characters’ actions sometimes calls to mind Werner Herzog’s tragicomic existentialism, as well as early silent cinema.
  61. Honeyland
    As the world continues to suffer ever-increasing mass die-offs of honeybee colonies, Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s film reminds us that there’s indeed a better way to interact with our planet—one rooted in patience, tradition, and a true respect for our surroundings.
  62. The Beasts
    The film is as much about the beastliness of outmoded machismo as it is about the perseverance and fortitude of women in opposition to it.
  63. Holy Motors
    Léos Carax's maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile.
  64. God's Own Country
    Writer-director Francis Lee captures not only what masculinity does and how it comes undone, but the complex apparatus that keeps it into place: the family’s surveillance, the silence, the shame.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Kaili Blues
    Bi Gan's film is a soulful depiction of China's increasingly rapid pace of cultural and economic transformation.
  66. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven brought the revisionist revenge film into the 1990s and, by extension, the 21st century
  67. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear now seems much less like Salt of the Earth-as-a-potboiler and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.
  68. Everybody Wants Some!!
    Richard Linklater's film luxuriates in a world that's the platonic ideal of youthful indulgence.
  69. Two Prosecutors
    The film is a satiric look at Stalinism and bureaucracy with shades of Kafka, Orwell, and Gogol.
  70. The Past
    Farhadi navigates his complicated narrative thicket with an apparent ease that confirms yet again that he's an amazing talent, but here he isn't able to blend the brushstrokes as he has in prior films.
  71. 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.
  72. Black Bag
    By the time the film comes to the end of its brisk runtime, it feels like nothing much has actually happened, despite all the narrative convolutions.
  73. Cinderella
    Despite its prodigious charms, it has probably destroyed more lives than any other Disney film, forcing a specific, unrealistic romantic archetype that truly does only exist in fairy tales onto generations of impressionable children, who would grow up desperate, needy, and crushed.
  74. One Child Nation
    Rich in intimate detail, the film attains a more epic power as it burrows deeper into the effects of China’s one-child policy.
  75. Vengeance Is Mine
    Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.
  76. Identifying Features
    The film is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about not seeing, about struggling to recognize that which might not clarify much at all.
  77. The Sacrifice
    In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission.
  78. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
    A supplementary subject of most of Herzog’s work, which it shares with Chatwin’s, is a bottomless yearning for wonder.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Tree of Life
    The Tree of Life's fetching images are like glowing shards of glass, and together they form a grandiose mirror that reflects Malick's impassioned philosophical outlook. It's unquestionably this great filmmaker's most personal work, a revelation of how he came to be, why he creates, and where he feels he's going.
  80. Decision to Leave
    Throughout the film, one often feels the plot machinations working against Park Chan-wook’s poetry, though in a few cases poetry wins out.
  81. Daughters
    The importance of touch between a parent and child—and, in the case of this film, specifically between a father and daughter—is rarely discussed openly in Daughters, but it looms large over nearly every scene.
  82. The Fabelmans
    The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.
  83. 'Round Midnight
    Jazz music is a state of mind in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ’Round Midnight.
  84. Starless Dreams
    Mehrdad Oskouei avoids sentimentalizing the girls or tritely lamenting their stolen innocence.
  85. The Departure
    The Departure presents patterns in suicidal people while according them humanity, which isn’t a small accomplishment.
  86. Sunless Shadows
    Redolent of Claude Lanzmann’s approach, Mehrdad Oskouei strips his images to their barest bones as his subjects openly speak about their traumas, as if trying to avoid aestheticizing their pain.
  87. Beyond Utopia
    The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.
  88. Stalker
    Subscribing to the belief that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Tarkovsky locates Stalker’s spiritual center in his protagonists’ weathered countenances.
  89. Beanpole
    Kantemir Balagov depicts pain in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of coping and collapse with delicate subtlety.
  90. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    It captures the strength of Fred Rogers's convictions even as his gentleness and sincerity fell further out of favor.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Long Day Closes
    The Long Day Closes posits its pubescent protagonist as a tiny camera absorbing and transforming the reality all around him.
  92. Fruitvale Station
    Sensitively performed and laced with some forceful quotidian grit, the film evades the larger questions behind a scandalous shooting death.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I'm Still Here
    The film has trouble excavating any coarse humanism from this decidedly human story, opting instead to paint the family at its center in broad, uninspired strokes.
  94. A Useful Ghost
    Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s defense of historical memory couldn’t be more timely.
  95. Watchers of the Sky
    This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.
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