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 6.3 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
view
per page
  1. I Love You, Daddy
    It’s as exhilaratingly honest and unshackled a work as many have come to expect from this auteur of cringe comedy, one that foresees, absorbs, and responds to all possible bile that might be directed its way, knowing full well of the muck it dredges up.
  2. Ad Astra
    In a future where the plagues of civilization have only evolved into new shapes and sizes, it asks, in a roundabout way, if there’s anything worthier of exploration than our own relationships.
  3. Some Like It Hot
    Magnificently paced and terrifically funny at nearly every turn, Some Like It Hot was imbued with an inherent distrust of capitalism and big business that Wilder regularly expressed in an only slightly covert manner.
  4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    One of the subtlest and most extraordinarily fluid of American horror films, Kaufman crafts textured scenes, rich in emotional and object-centric tactility, that cause our heads to casually spin with expectation and dread.
  5. Wait Until Dark
    When the lights go out at the end of the film, so did the lights in the movie theaters.Terence Young’s tense cinematic adaptation so ruthlessly tightens the screws of tension that one could be forgiven for not noticing an earthquake, much less dimmed house lights.
  6. I Am Not a Witch
    It finds that rare nexus of the comic and the tragic, underlining the absurdity of a terrible situation without demeaning those who have been harmed by it.
  7. Night on Earth
    Jarmusch playfully blurs the line between driver/passenger, servant/customer, and native/immigrant, presenting these divisions as virtually meaningless social constructs which merely breed unnecessary contempt.
  8. Down by Law
    Divorcing New Orleans from its stereotypes (there’s no ham-fisted Creole dialogue, no digs at the indigenous cuisine), the filmmaker imagines the boiling, boggy city as a purgatory for lost souls, spotted with cinephiliac mold.
  9. Homicide
    The Pulitzer-winning playwright’s movies are often a few steps ahead of their audiences, but Homicide seems to have intuitively anticipated its now-exemplary status.
  10. All the President's Men
    All the President’s Men’s masterstroke is how it rejects mythologizing the pivotal history behind it, appropriately forgoing a climax by closing on a simple telex furiously relaying messages. The film doesn’t present two underdogs bringing down a president; it’s two reporters doing business as usual.
  11. The Right Stuff
    The titular “stuff” is shown to be a combination of courage, determination, and recklessness, but, as Kaufman’s stirring epic reminds us, an equally important motivation for greatness is the fear of being merely second best.
  12. Nenette and Boni
    A sibling drama of unsentimental urban grit and swooning lyricism, Nénette and Boni meditates on the myriad permutations of love and sensuality, from familial longings to food fetishes.
  13. Bitter Money
    Wang Bing's documentaries are angry, raw testaments to the human spirit in the face of social injustice. In this regard, his latest, the harrowing, soulful Bitter Money, is fortunately no exception.
  14. High Life
    The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian.
  15. 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.
  16. Transit
    Christian Petzold’s lean, rigorous filmmaking proves essential as the story begins to run, deliberately, in circles.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The African Queen
    Bogart slyly draws upon his past performances here—men of weary-eyed cynicism and faded idealism—to give Charlie’s rudderless existence an extra-textual charge.
  18. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is as enduring a classic as has ever come out of Hollywood, and arguably among the greatest, but the film is admittedly not without its share of rough spots.
  19. Persona
    Despite its elaborate meta-game-playing, which has had a pronounced and unquantifiable influence on film culture, Persona remains intensely alive and intimate.
    • 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.
  21. The Irishman
    Scorsese knows what his audience is hoping for: glory days, resurrected. But he also understands the impossibility of anyone being exactly as they once were. So he weaves that longing into both The Irishman‘s text and its technique.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. Shirkers
    Sandi Tan's view of what the original Shirkers represented, and what her new film should be, proves surprisingly expansive.
  25. The Best Years of Our Lives
    If The Best Years of Our Lives emerges as a more contemporary-seeing film than almost anything else to which its ingredients could compare, it’s because of how it wrestles with the burden of patriotism. The nation’s problems are right there in plain sight, just as clear as cinematographer Gregg Toland’s typically precise deep-focus shots.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Swamp Thing
    It all adds up to a surefire cult film in the making.
  27. El Mar La Mar
    The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.
  28. Infinite Football
    Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania.
  29. The Cat o' Nine Tails
    Structurally and thematically, Dario Argento’s The Cat O’ Nine Tails is an improvement over The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, even if the film’s non-linear convolutions of plot may purposefully distract. Set against a backdrop of genetic research and espionage, Argento’s formal obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness is on fierce display.
    • 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.
  31. Re-Animator
    It is almost as though these filmmakers are afraid they’ll never get the chance to make another one, and Re-Animator doesn’t hesitate in being an almost operatic, larger than life comedy of splatter. While it paints with a big (red) brush, it is never boring.
  32. Milla
    Valérie Massadian's Milla begins with a stylistic bait-and-switch that neatly summarizes the film's overall sense of formal balance.
  33. The Howling
    From the very first scene, The Howling plays around with the notion of vulnerability as a role-playing exercise, a pseudo-sex game.
  34. Good Luck
    Good Luck's political implications—most prominently that the almighty dollar is humanity's enduring slave master—are expertly woven into the hallucinatory aural-visual fabric of the film.
  35. My Beautiful Laundrette
    My Beautiful Laundrette is still fresh and remains a model case for creating moving, liberating cinema from an oppressive environment. It’s every bit the landmark gay film it deserves to be.
  36. Streets of Fire
    Walter Hill’s 1984 film combines everything from seedy bars, street fights, motorcycles, beefy heavies, and tough dames in a smorgasbord of tawdry, moral-flouting clichés that distills decades of imagery that represents youth in cinema.
  37. Sollers Point
    Sollers Point is a moving and elusive blend of naturalism and melodrama, less a character study than an analysis of a community.
  38. Meantime
    Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema.
  39. Castle in the Sky
    Miyazaki’s concerns with the fragility and wonder of our less tangible surroundings haunt the picture without overpowering it.
  40. Diane
    Every moment in Jones’s film is so precisely textured that it becomes fantastical.
  41. Porco Rosso
    It's in this view of the military life, and competition in general, that Porco Rosso reveals itself to be one of Miyazaki’s most personal works.
  42. New York, New York
    New York, New York, like most Martin Scorsese films, is about the trials and glories of making art.
  43. Climax
    Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.
  44. Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China.
  45. Birds of Passage
    Money corrupts, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s would say. Easy money corrupts completely.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Burning
    With Burning, Lee Chang-dong extraordinarily obliterates the bifurcation between life and representation, the thing in itself and the metaphor.
  47. Shoplifters
    In Shoplifters, Kore-eda dramatizes the insidious and relativistic ordinariness of poverty.
  48. The Wild Pear Tree
    Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual.
  49. 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.
  50. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    While Roger Ebert’s screenplay contains overt jabs at Hollywood’s culture of exploitation, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cannot be called anything but sincere regarding its penchant for buxom female anatomy.
  51. Araby
    A carefree life on the move is steadily and exquisitely overtaken by melancholy in writer-directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa’s Arábia, the portrait of a meandering journey fueled by song, anecdote, and landscape that zeroes in on the pressures of contemporary Brazil almost in passing.
  52. In the Heights
    Consistently surprising and creatively fearless, John C. Chu’s film brings monumentality to a work of infinite heart.
  53. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    Isao Takahata makes survival the thematic core of the story, but he never degrades his characters or fetishizes their suffering.
  54. Deep Red
    A great horror film about a weak man who, gazing into a vibrant pool of freshly spilled blood, learns just how little he ultimately knows.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Phantom of the Paradise
    This is De Palma pouring the new wine of his formal inventiveness and anti-authoritarian irreverence into the old bottles of archetypal myths, and it remains a supremely entertaining anomaly within his filmography, yet entirely emblematic of his filmmaking sensibilities.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    It's Alive
    By turns frightening and heartbreaking, an aspect particularly reflected in John P. Ryan’s tormented performance as the baby’s father, the film is not only perhaps one of Cohen’s best films but one of the finest American horror films of the last 30 years.
  57. Ray & Liz
    Ray & Liz generates pathos through its detailed attention to its characters' attempts to find permanence and meaning in a fundamentally unstable reality.
  58. Distant Constellation
    The film exposes the idea of places as metaphors, mirrors, and symptoms for the people who inhabit them.
  59. Serial Mom
    Serial Mom is the strongest film of the post-midnight-movie chapter of John Waters’s career.
  60. 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).
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    With so many brilliant collaborators and points of view, whose movie—whose dream—is it anyway? Ashby seems to say it’s all of ours.
  62. The Mountain
    For all its emotional restraint, Rick Alverson’s film builds to a point of remarkable pathos.
  63. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind isn't a novelty item, but a work of anguished art that's worthy of its creator.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Being There
    Elegiac and yet ruefully funny, Hal Ashby’s Being There is at once a profoundly philosophical fable about how we become truly human only in the face of our ineluctable mortality, as well as an incensed satire intent on skewering the mass media’s unhealthy sway among the corridors of wealth and power.
  65. 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.
  66. Dragged Across Concrete
    With his latest, S. Craig Zahler doubles down on the best and worst elements of the pulp film.
  67. Hotel by the River
    A story of a poet, Hotel by the River comes to resemble a poetry collection itself, abounding in emotional currents and grace notes that are bracingly allowed to hang, free of reductive explication.
  68. A Family Tour
    Ying Liang’s film is righteously and vigorously angry about injustices committed by the Chinese government.
  69. Dead Souls
    The anguish expressed and experiences described by the survivors certainly can overlap with each other, and even become repetitive, but it’s ultimately this unification of perspective that gives Dead Souls its authority—and that allows it to become an incisive reappropriation of collectivist solidarity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Rope
    A crime for most, a privilege for some is how Rupert classifies murder, but Hitchcock's eye-am-a-camera technique in Rope is after more than Nazi-superman residue still lurking after WWII.
  71. High Flying Bird
    Steven Soderbergh’s film considers modern media as a vehicle for revising white patriarchal capitalism.
  72. Over the Limit
    The film is composed of minutely observed moments that Marta Prus has assembled into an affecting narrative.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Piranha
    Dante makes films that Spielberg’s id might make, movies that double down on pop cultural know-how and riotous thrills without pausing for anything so unentertaining as an earnest assessment of humanity.
  74. Dumbo
    In its scant 64-minute running time, the big-top melodrama of Dumbo reduces me to a blubbering, mucus-drizzling wreck at least once with every viewing.
  75. The Waldheim Waltz
    Despite Beckermann’s contemplative, even-tempered tone, The Waldheim Waltz gradually builds outrage at the subterranean persistence of fascism in postwar politics.
  76. Life and Nothing More
    Antonio Méndez Esparza crafts a revealing portrait of life as lived under a regime of race and class oppression.
  77. Pinocchio
    Pinocchio redeemed Disney from the parlor trickery of Snow White and suggested animated features could indeed dance without strings.
  78. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.
  79. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    Patrick Wang's particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles.
  80. The Grief of Others
    This a much leaner film in terms of narrative incident than In the Family, though it paves the way for Patrick Wang to step into new artistic terrain.
  81. Alice in Wonderland
    Of course, Alice in Wonderland has long been the Disney film of choice in the realm of drug cinema, but this radical and ridiculous trip through a bombastically colored otherworld imparts a balanced wisdom that goes beyond bong-rip philosophizing.
  82. Cinderella
    Thematically, Cinderella preaches something far more easily tangible and relatable to the everyday than a flying elephant, romantic pooches, or mining dwarves: respect and understanding for hard work and those who tirelessly labor with no need for false praise or special consideration.
  83. 101 Dalmatians
    Cruella De Vil is so much a tour de force that she single-handedly snatches the movie away from any retroactive comparisons to the likes of The Rescuers or Robin Hood or any of the other post-classical Disney features whose sloppiness is their only saving grace.
  84. Amazing Grace
    It offers a profound glimpse of one of the greatest and most influential voices in modern music.
  85. Fantasia
    It’s unquestionably among Disney’s masterpieces.
  86. Cruising
    Its truly unnerving quality is that its existence is a brutal reminder from the past that homosexuality is not heterosexuality, and that any attempt to reconcile the difference will only breed resentment, confusion, and violence. Or perhaps it will only lead to more lame Hallmark movies of the week like Brokeback Mountain.
  87. Alice Sweet Alice
    Alice, Sweet Alice conflates the angst of adolescent sexual development with the fury of Catholic retribution, suggesting at times an analog version of David Fincher’s Se7en.
  88. Paris, Texas
    Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Totally F***ed Up
    The total lack of pity and condescension carries the film over its rough spots and aimless patches. The endings of the director’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (of which Totally F***ed Up is the first part) may seem utterly desolating, yet they all move toward a rejection of negativism in favor of the harsh but inescapable complexities of the world. Life is f***ked up, Araki is saying, but it is worth living.
  90. Fyre
    Chris Smith’s documentary about the 2017 Fyre Festival implosion resists the urge to revel in cheap social media schadenfreude.
  91. House
    House has a superb premise that begs for a more ambitious framework, both formally and psychologically.
  92. Midsommar
    A deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.
  93. The Farewell
    The film taps into universal truths about the passage of time, the inevitability of loss, and how we prepare one another for it.
  94. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    The film simultaneously announces itself as an expressive portrait of a city, an endearing ode to male comradery, a leisurely paced hangout flick, an absurdist comedy, and a melancholic reflection on gentrification and urban black experience.
  95. The Souvenir
    Its stylistic fluctuations are a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today.
  96. 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.
  97. The Unicorn
    The documentary illuminates how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.
  98. Fourteen
    Dan Sallitt recognizes that even the sturdiest of friendships are inevitably tested by time and the evolution of personal responsibility.
  99. Mr. Jones
    The film is an unnervingly beautiful tribute to the lives lost during the Holodomor, and to the people who have seen the world for what it is, instead of the dream of it they’re instructed to believe.
  100. The Plagiarists
    This is a rigorous film concerned with questions of cultural appropriation, learned behavior, and the very texture of life in our content-saturated present (a feeling not exclusive to urban centers), but one with the good humor and wisdom to disguise itself as something far more familiar.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »