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. Two Plains & a Fancy
    No description can do justice to its best moments, which render the absurd and sublime one and the same.
  2. The Eyes of Orson Welles
    The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.
  3. Opening Night
    Opening Night hits closest to home in its long, haunting, tension-fueled riffs between Cassavetes and Rowlands, playing lovers on stage and former lovers off stage.
  4. Valley of the Dolls
    Look, fun is fun, and there’s plenty of the kitschy brand to be had from the riot of late-‘60s production design and lurid plot developments.
  5. Working Woman
    Michal Aviad’s film forcefully brings home a reality that many of us have been aware of only intellectually.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Django
    In a genre known for endless knock-offs, a trend that includes Django’s 30-plus sequels, Corbucci’s film is notable not only for the artistry of its construction, but also for the underlying anger that fuels its political agenda.
  7. 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.
  8. Carmine Street Guitars
    The film celebrates the thingness of things, as well as the assuring clarity and lucidity that can arise from devotion to knowledge.
  9. Nashville
    Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.
  10. Midnight Traveler
    Balancing rough-edge verité with highly composed images and a meticulous structure, it doesn’t preclude itself from finding something like poetry in its subjects’ struggles.
  11. Framing John DeLorean
    John DeLorean has a biography that could have been reverse engineered from a Hollywood epic about the rise and fall of an auto-industry mogul.
  12. Sorry We Missed You
    It’s difficult to imagine a more socially engaged or powerful condemnation of the exploitative gig economy than Ken Loach’s latest.
  13. The Wild Goose Lake
    The film’s masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them.
  14. Zombi Child
    Bertrand Bonello’s quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract.
  15. The Cordillera of Dreams
    For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.
  16. The Garden
    Derek Jarman’s 1990 film isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Stagecoach
    If this is the Old West of our dreams, it’s one that exists in an outsider’s limbo, away from society’s rules, alternating between the breathtaking breadth of the American landscape and the Germanically shadowy lighting of Ford’s claustrophobic interiors.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Hustler
    With solid performances, a great jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins, and a virtual clinic in how to do black-and-white cinematography thanks to Eugene Shuftan’s camerawork, The Hustler reaffirms your faith in the movies.
  19. Anatomy of a Murder
    Preminger had the confidence in his performers and faith in his intelligent viewers: a happy combination.
  20. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    Radu Jude’s film is a bitterly comic essay on nationalist mythologies and historical amnesia.
  21. Breaker Morant
    A time-jumping narrative that’s rooted inside the linear temporal unfoldings of a pre-determined trial, Breaker Morant is like a conventional bloke in art—house clothing—but oh, what garb he has.
  22. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    At its finest, this psychedelic, horror-strewn romp’s artistry perfectly reflects the intensity of Strange navigating endless alternate realms.
  23. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.
  24. Uncut Gems
    In the film, a man's individual tragedy illuminates the emptiness of the systems that define him.
  25. Ema
    In the film, the literal union of bodies is the only logical means of conveying the reestablishment of emotional bonds.
  26. Saturday Fiction
    The hegemony of history is rigid, but Lou Ye is still able to disrupt it in the form of its representation.
  27. The Painted Bird
    Václav Marhoul’s film is at its most magnificent when it lingers on the poetry of its images.
  28. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    Over 40 years after its release, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song still retains its shock value, but even more so, it remains distinct as a work that cannot be squarely placed within a singular category.
  29. About Endlessness
    Rather than eliciting surprise and wonder, Roy Andersson channels his full stylistic arsenal in search of something far more delicate: a recognition of the sublime in the prosaic.
  30. The Long Goodbye
    The film is simultaneously an act of revisionism as well as a parody of then-revitalizing neo-noir.
  31. Eating Raoul
    A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    One Million Years B.C.
    One Million Years B.C. ends where the story of humanity begins: in a seemingly endless saga of strife and solidarity that resonates down to the present day.
  33. Black Sabbath
    Black Sabbath speaks to the vastness of Bava’s abilities in the realms of the terrifying and the supernatural.
  34. Depraved
    Larry Fessenden diagnoses the rot of our era through the shifting personalities and power dynamics of solipsistic men.
  35. Rashomon
    The film is still one of the most glorious testaments to the frustrations and exhilarations of chasing an unvarnished truth.
  36. Say Amen, Somebody
    Throughout, artists intermingle in scenes that have been rendered with an Altman-esque sense of personal panorama.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Bonfire of the Vanities
    For all its polish, Bonfire of the Vanities neither sustains the feverish, revolutionary energy nor reaches the visceral peak of Hi, Mom! But as major Hollywood pictures go, it can become stunningly hot-tempered, a quality most journalists are too quick to ignore.
  38. The Killers
    The Killers redux packs one lasting, significant, retrospective jolt of perversity that far eclipses any possible artistic intentions on the part of its creators though: the sight of future American President Ronald Reagan playing a baddie in his last film role before entering politics.
  39. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Herzog’s idiosyncratic horror classic remains a vital conversation between two distinct generations of brilliant German filmmakers.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    63 Up
    Throughout, the remaining participants take stock of private and career successes as well as perceived failures.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Black Christmas just may be the perfect antidote to the saccharine sweetness of most Christmastime fare.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Fright Night
    What makes Fright Night such a hoot to this day, on top of the great performances, is the deft blending of humor and suspense that Holland manages to build in his story.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Night of the Creeps
    Night of the Creeps is the “I Love the ‘80s” of moviemaking. It has every element and cliché ever put into a film made in the greatest decade.
  44. Pom Poko
    Takahata’s wondrous film is itself at constant interplay between the unsentimental realities of human progress (and expansion) and the unbound thoughts and creative perspectives that fantasy can entertain without necessarily being reduced to mere entertainment.
  45. Chinese Portrait
    The simplicity of bodies barely moving before a camera that brings their quotidian temporality into a halt is nothing short of a radical proposition in our digital era.
  46. The Matrix Resurrections
    Where the love story was a means-to-an-end afterthought in the first Matrix, it’s now the crux of the tale, and the emotional undercurrents are so intoxicating that it more than makes up for the relative inelegance of the action scenes.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Driven by the potency of its social intentions, the film is so authentically felt that it becomes hyper-real, a nightmarish disquisition about how entire systems are rigged against women that would feel academic if it didn’t play out against earnest performances of tender teenage emotions.
  48. Watership Down
    Martin Rosen’s eloquent, wondrous film offers a deceivingly simple yet powerful view of a war-ridden rabbit society.
  49. A Boy and His Dog
    A Boy and His Dog is an unruly daydream capped with a surprisingly jet-black acknowledgment of humankind’s genetic destiny to ruin itself.
  50. 1900
    Bernardo Bertolucci’s film is a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity.
  51. Raya and the Last Dragon
    On its own gorgeously depicted terms, this film sticks the landing as a celebration of hope, a manifestation of what unfettered trust in our shared humanity could look like.
  52. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    It’s in certain characters’ trajectories that the Ross brothers locate the tragic soul of the bar.
  53. Zola
    Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.
  54. Just Don't Think I'll Scream
    This intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue that will feel painfully familiar to many cinephiles in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
  55. Smooth Talk
    Throughout, Joyce Chopra patiently and shrewdly observes the contradictions of human behavior that Laura Dern brilliantly conveys.
  56. On the Rocks
    There are few modern filmmakers who possess Sofia Coppola’s gift for capturing how our idealized, movie-fed ideas of “night life” reflect our longing for adventure as well as our loneliness.
  57. The Souvenir: Part II
    Joanna Hogg’s film is a work of understated warmth, profound emotional complexity, and eminently British dry humor.
  58. Feels Good Man
    That the democratization of the internet has opened a doorway for fascist ideologies to openly quash democratic ones is an irony that isn’t lost on the film.
  59. Saudi Runaway
    Camera, character, and cameraperson are one throughout, and the effect is exquisitely suffocating.
  60. There Is No Evil
    The film grapples with the various shapes that guilt and honor (or lack thereof) might take in a context of state-sanctioned death.
  61. Days
    Reciprocity might be impossible in a world rigged against queerness, Tsai seems to say, which doesn’t mean that certain things can't still be shared.
  62. Days of Cannibalism
    The film ultimately depicts a world in which people are left with no other option but to devour their own.
  63. Swing Time
    Swing Time has some of Astaire and Rogers’s mightiest set pieces, which are intertwined to reflect their characters’ evolving relationship.
  64. 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.
  65. Collective
    The film reminds us that without investigative reporting there’s no democracy, and that traditional expectations around impartiality and objectivity may be untenable in the face of horror.
  66. The Wolf House
    The film’s animation leans into its most jerky, artificial qualities, all the better to enhance the atmosphere of bizarre unreality.
  67. Hamilton
    The show offers testimony to the power of communal storytelling, just as mighty on screen as on stage.
  68. Klute
    Pakula’s seminal detective thriller, which is truly a piercing examination of loneliness.
  69. Dear Diary
    As an auteur film, Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario inhabits a kind of beyond, because instead of presenting a world filtered through his subjective lens, the filmmaker allows the viewer inside his very subjectivity.
  70. Babette's Feast
    This impeccably plated set is as savory as the brains sucked out of a quail’s head by Jarl Kulle’s General Löwenhielm.
  71. Sweetie
    Sweetie’s brilliance stems from how Campion inventively explores the relationship between inanimate objects and personal memory, Sally Bongers’s static camera lingering on the precipice of a family unit brimming with secrets and lies.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The War Room
    The buddy-film dynamic between braniac lead strategist James Carville and telegenic communications director George Stephanopoulos provides The War Room with a compelling through line and emotional cornerstone.
  73. Mikey and Nicky
    Few films have so exquisitely captured how straight American men reveal their affections and insecurities to one another, as well as how they’re both threatened and awed by each other.
  74. The Awful Truth
    The Awful Truth is a perfect farce, devoid of any fat, in which Lucy and Jerry’s fantasies and schemes topple after one another like figurative dominoes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Irma Vep
    The post-modern compulsions on display here may bring movies together, but they also keep people apart. Irma Vep is a picture of missed connections and tenuous relationships, most touchingly in the scenes between Cheung and Zoe (Nathalie Richard), her smitten costume designer.
  76. The Honeymoon Killers
    The Honeymoon Killers is an intense, terrifying portrait of repression and instability.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    Lee foregoes useless speechifying, opting instead to create an epic document of New Orleans’s struggle, death, abandonment and subsequent reconstruction (a requiem in four acts) that should prove instructive for years to come, if not in facts than for its emotional scope: an up-close, deeply empathetic and soulful journey through the stories that make up this catastrophe.
  78. Richard III
    Donning a doozy of a puttied schnoz, a slightly exaggerated limp, and a boyish, midnight-black wig, Sir Laurence Olivier feels more at home in the eponymous role of his own adaptation of Richard III than he does in any of his other storied roles, holding and releasing the succulent prose with unerring confidence and clarity.
  79. The Killing
    One of the great devils of 1950s American cinema.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    On Dangerous Ground
    The urban harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all film noir. Despite the violence and the steady intensity, a remarkably pure film.
    • 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.
  82. Destry Rides Again
    Above all, Destry Rides Again is fun, with a variety of stars and character actors utilizing their charisma with an expert sense of ease and offhandedness.
  83. Time
    It reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time.
  84. The Mole Agent
    That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.
  85. Space Dogs
    The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.
  86. Hopper/Welles
    Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper both understand that cinema’s inherent fakeness is the wellspring of its importance and its danger.
  87. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    American Utopia feels as much like a balm as it is a surprisingly direct call to political action and social betterment.
  88. Notturno
    The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.
  89. 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.
  90. City Hall
    Its provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Frederick Wiseman’s own.
  91. The Disciple
    Chaitanya Tamhane gives full dimension to the rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory nature of the relationship between disciple and guru.
  92. Never Gonna Snow Again
    With Never Gonna Snow Again, Malgorzata Szumowska presents a charm against apocalyptic despair but also willful ignorance, insisting that, with sufficient imagination, we can face a climate crisis of our own making.
  93. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Lili Horvát’s film delights in wallowing in ambiguity, contradiction, and doubt.
  94. My Man Godfrey
    La Cava’s supple but cutting romantic comedy is one of the finest works of class-conscious comedy in Hollywood history.
  95. Husbands
    One of Cassavetes’s greatest and most daring films.
  96. Dating Amber
    Dating Amber rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship.
  97. Ham on Rye
    The film’s purposeful archness challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.
  98. 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.
  99. Meet Me in St. Louis
    Vincente Minnelli’s most acclaimed musical, Meet Me in St. Louis is a fresh breath of stale air, a tart ode to nostalgia.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    Twins of Evil benefits considerably from seasoned performances by a veteran cast that includes genre icon Peter Cushing, Dennis Price, and Kathleen Byron.
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