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 Eternal Memory
    Maite Alberdi’s film slowly reveals the personal loss of the ability to remember as inextricably linked to the loss of national memory.
  2. The Handmaiden
    With The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook has made a gigantic leap as an artist, but he retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he’s earned your trust.
  3. Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
    The film synthesizes the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion with the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale.
  4. EO
    EO feels freed of plot, free of expectation, driven only by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Black Is King
    Out of a dazzling fusion of the hottest trends of American R&B and Afrobeat, this visual album proposes a pan-African vision of legacy, abundance, and unity, making it Beyoncé’s most wide-reaching and ambitious effort yet.
  6. The Work
    In its visceral purity, Jairus McLeary's film drags male toxicity up into the light, offering it as a cure for itself.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Giant
    Sitting through it is like cramming a decade’s worth of daily television-watching into a single sitting.
  8. 76 Days
    The documentary may be the defining portrait of the dawning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
  9. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    The sense that they don’t make mass entertainments like this anymore is palpable.
  10. The Truffle Hunters
    The film’s reminder of the fragility of agrarian traditions in the face of a merciless profit motive is delivered with tact and subtlety.
  11. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Shaka King’s film, anchored by two sterling lead performances, complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom.
  12. Husbands and Wives
    Allen bravely posits one’s fear of change and the comfort in finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind.
  13. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    The film is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence.
  14. After the Storm
    The stock character types that Hirokazu Kore-eda employs across the board are pretty much open books from the start.
  15. Moonrise Kingdom
    Although the film remains continually fanciful, it always reminds us of the stakes in which precocious childhood rubs up against the possibility of a childhood denied altogether.
  16. 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.
  17. Sinners
    Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Limelight
    A beautiful, melancholy meditation on aging and inspiration, and a personal film that, on account of Chaplin’s own diminishing popularity and prospects stemming from accusations of supposed communist sympathies, exudes a very real weight in each of its rich, elegant images.
  19. Intercepted
    The film’s most effective material comes in its analysis of how the military state’s permission structures for inhumanity traumatize citizens in order to harden them and focus their hatred.
  20. McQueen
    As Ian Bonhôte's documentary reveals, Alexander McQueen's suicide was perhaps the all-too-predictable ending to a history of violence.
  21. Earth Mama
    Despite Earth Mama’s bleak subject matter, it exudes a beatific warmth, in large part because Leaf takes remarkable pains to dramatize a web of solidarity between a group of Black women alongside her depiction of the very system that disenfranchises them.
  22. Booksmart
    It's an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls’ experiences without sacrificing grossness, and that you can be gross without being too mean.
  23. Wise Blood
    Huston’s Wise Blood is a sharp, busy canvas that, like a man with a good car, doesn’t need to be justified.
  24. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    Mitchum doesn’t remotely overshadow the film’s first-rate ensemble of character actors.
  25. Reality
    The film interrogates both the state of our world and the lines between fiction and document.
  26. Marx Can Wait
    Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.
  27. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.
  28. Sirât
    The film is a vivid meditation on human possibility in the face of fate and nature’s tumultuous might, ending in a fog of ambiguity that mirrors that characters’ bewilderment.
  29. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    Often blunt and unwieldy, Mohamed Rasolouf's film is nevertheless impactful.
  30. Trafic
    If Playtime’s enormous scope was visionary, here Tati’s tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher.
  31. Harmonium
    Throughout Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada works in a rapt and lucid hyper-textural style that suggests a merging of the sensibilities of Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujirô Ozu.
  32. Kagemusha
    The film vibrates with a profound respect for historical veracity, the busy intersection between political sociology and psychology, and grunting, portentous masculinity.
  33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
    The film remains a stunning collective of method acting and 1970s social critique.
  34. Heart of a Dog
    Laurie Anderson condenses contemporary, human experience to the point where exterior and interior are made indistinguishable from one another.
  35. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.
  36. 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.
  37. Personal Problems (1980)
    Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed collapse conventional notions of reality, providing simultaneous glimpses into the minds of dozens of characters, lingering on scenes and informing them with confessional intensity.
  38. Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back
    Even 48 years after its release, and well into Dylan’s current phase of relative transparency, D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back retains something of a forbidden quality, a feeling that we shouldn’t be privy to the things it shows us.
  39. Aferim!
    The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Is God Is
    Featuring larger-than-life characters described with epithets like “monster” and “the rough one,” and blending brutal violence with themes of generational trauma, abuse, and toxic masculinity, the film ponders what one does with the bottomless hate of being wronged.
  41. War Witch
    Though ostensibly a character study, it's nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film, one whose candor in the face of brutality seems calculated for maximum liberal appeal.
  42. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    The final passages are the most exultant in their taking us beyond ourselves into a wide-eyed state of untarnished possibilities; entirely without words, the film reminds us that, despite how far we’ve come, the real odyssey has only just begun.
  43. Toy Story 4
    The film seamlessly interweaves fun escapades and earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of its predecessor.
  44. On the Record
    Russell Simmons’ victims’ sense of their own complex relations to historical power structures emerges from the film’s lucid recounting of the sexual assault allegations against him.
  45. In My Room
    In My Room often exhibits an interest only in the accruing of incidents, giving it a this-happens-then-this-happens quality that defiantly eschews psychological shading.
  46. Chicken for Linda!
    However pleasurable and pretty Chicken for Linda may be in its individual scenes, it doesn’t so much achieve harmony through its balancing of contrasting elements as it fully surrenders to childlike whimsy.
  47. In the Heights
    Consistently surprising and creatively fearless, John C. Chu’s film brings monumentality to a work of infinite heart.
  48. Fire of Love
    The film oscillates between the playfully on the nose and the existentially profound with the confidence of a volcano chaser surfing on a river of lava.
  49. Blood Simple
    There's a simple magnetism inherent in this kind of filmmaking, and the Coens know how to orchestrate it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Oslo, August 31st
    The evocation of things ending suffuses the film with melancholy, as Anders increasingly becomes an observant rather than a participant in his own life.
  51. Hamnet
    Though Hamnet is concerned with bottomless grief and the unique power of art to express the inexpressible, it can’t help but telegraph its themes loudly and incessantly, its emotional register off-puttingly monotonous.
  52. The Witch
    The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.
  53. Looper
    As in the very best Anthony Mann and John Ford westerns, Looper at once understands the visual power of violence and is deeply critical of it.
  54. Graduation
    Cristian Mungiu's film is more than just a cry of despair toward the hopelessness of life in modern-day Romania.
  55. Kubo and the Two Strings
    It offers a powerful metaphor for the manner in which we carry the memories of our departed inside ourselves.
  56. Aliens
    Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production.
  57. The Other Side of Hope
    The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.
  58. The Vast of Night
    Director AndrePatterson never breaks the film's incantatory spell with pointless freneticism, patiently savoring the great thrill of genre stories: anticipation.
  59. You Were Never Really Here
    Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here could be considered artsy exploitation, a film whose formal dexterity belies its debts to its chosen, and quite squalid, genre.
  60. Homo Sapiens
    A real yet illusory world is evoked so seamlessly that it also feels just one step away from pure cinematic fiction.
  61. A Ghost Story
    An empty exercise in imitative long-take aestheticism, A Ghost Story fills its distractingly round-cornered frame with endless repetitions on a visual gag.
  62. The Square
    A blistering portrait of rebellion against social discord, marginalization and oppression, and a call to arms for true democratic ideals of dignity, justice, and fairness.
  63. Widows
    For all its flaws, Widows is McQueen’s most fascinating, bracing feature to date, a demonstration of the filmmaker embracing his commercial instincts instead of trying to pass them off as weighty and important.
  64. Love After Love
    In every scene, the film's cutting is dictated by the turbulent pace of the characters' inner lives.
  65. Boys State
    The film suggests that our political system is a popularity contest that functions for no one but those jockeying for power.
  66. 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.
  67. Museum Hours
    Jem Cohen's film finds its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects.
  68. On Her Shoulders
    The film is most interested in homing in on the ways Nadia Murad's fragility and self-doubt arise as collateral damage from her fame and steadfast activism.
  69. The Descendants
    In a development that seemed to begin in earnest with "Sideways," a large part of The Descendents seems to operate on a non-narrative level.
  70. First Man
    Damien Chazelle is clearly in awe of the collective efforts it took to propel Neil Armstrong to the moon, but he remains ambivalent about whether it was all ultimately worth such immense sacrifice.
  71. Snowpiercer
    The film preaches resolutely to the choir, and cinephiles in sync with the film's politics may still blanch at how snugly their interests are courted.
  72. Eephus
    Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Uncle
    Mon Oncle is not Jacques Tati’s most ambitious film, nor his most democratic. It is quite possibly, however, his most didactic and depressing.
  74. Youth (Hard Times)
    The second installment in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.
  75. The Letter
    Like Frankenstein’s monster in the Universal horror classics, The Letter keeps its prize creature too long in the shadows. But a Davis movie cannot withstand scrutiny without her, and even a bad Davis movie where she’s hamming and mugging and even humiliating herself is more fun than practically no Bette at all.
  76. Dry Ground Burning
    The film surprises by revealing deeper layers to both its subjects and social commentary.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Life After
    The film may be most powerful for how Reid Davenport subtly connects the experience of the disabled community with that of marginalized diaspora groups at large.
  78. Weiner
    Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg's film never discovers a greater purpose beyond its undeniable sideshow appeal.
  79. Stonewalling
    Stonewalling is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid (for China) women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications.
  80. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    The latest entrant in this now-Disney-owned franchise is largely content to further the themes and narrative strategies of J.J. Abrams's predecessor.
  81. The Waiting Room
    Documents emotionally charged interactions between patients and hospital staff without any signs that the subjects are being made to feel self-conscious or that they're behavior is being affected.
  82. Stray Dogs
    Tsai isn't making a social-problem film here, and his critique of patriarchal control is secondary to his portrait of unbearable psychic conditions.
  83. The Rescue
    Aside from being a thrilling account of a hair-raising rescue, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary attests to living a calling.
  84. Universal Language
    Though juxtaposing Canada’s drabness and relative lack of heritage with Iran’s millennia of unbroken tradition brings out the former aspects particularly clearly, Universal Language is aiming beyond mere satire or culture-clash playfulness.
  85. 13 Assassins
    Beginning with a series of traps before escalating into sword-to-sword skirmishes, Miike's centerpiece boasts sharp momentum and nasty muscularity.
  86. 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.
  87. The Disappearance of Shere Hite
    With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.
  88. The Blue Caftan
    The film is best experienced by simply wallowing in the lushness of its fabrics, sartorial and symbolic alike, refusing the temptation to unspool its poetic parallels.
  89. The Fool
    It takes place entirely at night, and the dingy color palette, washed-out and intentionally drab, presents Russia as an almost alien landscape.
  90. The Wrong Man
    The sense of moral responsibility in Hitchcock’s films may have never felt more imperative and succinct.
  91. De Palma
    Like Hitchcock, De Palma reveals himself to be guided by an unusual mixture of intuition and intellectualization.
  92. His Three Daughters
    His Three Daughters sneaks up on you, for as chatty, monologue-forward as Jacobs’s screenplay may be, it conveys so much through absence and suggestion.
  93. Leviticus
    As star-crossed lovers resolve to battle their demons rather than surrender, this at times intensely creepy horror tale reveals itself to also be a potent and poignant teen romance.
  94. Custody
    Custody is concerned with the failure of process to discern human need and perversion, and Xavier Legrand rather ironically follows in the footsteps of bureaucracy by reducing people to statistics.
  95. Under the Shadow
    The film's horror is spookily and movingly expressive of the tenuous position of women in 1980s Iran.
  96. The Forbidden Room
    Its utter indulgence in esoterica paradoxically leaves it most vulnerable to the beating heart of this great artist of self-therapy.
  97. My Dinner with Andre
    The fact that people don’t talk like this in real life isn’t a flaw in the film: It’s a tragic social deficiency.
  98. The Disciple
    Chaitanya Tamhane gives full dimension to the rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory nature of the relationship between disciple and guru.
  99. The Graduate
    Director Mike Nichols exploits rather than interrogates Ben’s anxieties, so that his ennui is reducible to his accomplishments, which keep getting repeated by the adults as badges of vicarious honor. Nichols also plays Ben’s socially awkward tics for laughs, whether Ben’s literally whimpering in Mrs. Robinson’s presence or in a cold sweat as he arranges what appears to be his first sexual encounter.
  100. Miss Kiet's Children
    Childhood in Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch's documentary is the terrain of contradiction and ambiguity.
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