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. Between the Temples
    A wealth of contrasting stimulation gives the film a singular and intimate atmosphere, in which scenes can last little eternities while still leaving you feeling as if you’re struggling to keep up with a stream of secrets and in-jokes.
  2. The Wind Rises
    Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.
  3. Limbo
    A comedy about the migrant crisis is more daring than a coming-of-age story, and Limbo, wanting it both ways, dilutes its best instincts with sops to formula.
  4. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    It’s in certain characters’ trajectories that the Ross brothers locate the tragic soul of the bar.
  5. Soul
    While most Pixar films pride themselves on presenting rich, fantastical responses to real-world wonderings, Soul keeps conjuring up visions that don’t correspond precisely enough to anything in the real world.
  6. Terrestrial Verses
    The sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug.
  7. The Salt of the Earth
    It evolves into an intimate reverie on family and aesthetics, while remaining sporadically attuned to the reflexive and ethical dimensions of ethnographic discovery.
  8. Glory
    The film's rough-hewn naturalism belies an exquisite sense of pace and a sneaky breed of gallows humor.
  9. Rat Film
    Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.
  10. The Perfect Neighbor
    Geeta Gandbhir’s trenchant documentary takes incendiary material and aims it at a larger target.
  11. Sing Sing
    In its depiction of actors flourishing through artistic struggle, Sing Sing ultimately argues that the most effective liberation happens through the freeing of the body as well as the soul.
  12. 20 Days in Mariupol
    At its core, 20 Days in Mariupol is a testament to the citizens of Mariupol.
  13. Turning Red
    After a first hour that may well hit Zoomers and their millennial parents in the feels, Turning Red gradually runs out of steam.
  14. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    The material realities of being a woman in Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film.
    • 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.
  16. Babi Yar. Context
    Sergei Loznitsa continues to mine the archives for what amount to living documents of a past that, as is all too clear, reverberate into the present with devastating force.
  17. '71
    It distinguishes itself from Pual Greengrass's films by virtue of its close attention to political and moral ambiguities.
  18. The Cave
    Its depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after The Cave’s doctors have left Ghouta.
  19. Blackfish
    The Frankensteinian rebellion of orcas against their corporate captors turns this doc into a sort of showbiz horror film.
  20. The Guilty
    The Guilty is a taut chamber thriller dominated by the flinty yet highly emotive visage of actor Jakob Cedergren.
  21. Prayers for the Stolen
    There’s a haunting beauty to Tatiana Huezo’s depiction of the gradual cross-contamination of childhood innocence and criminal aggression.
  22. The Girl and the Spider
    Zürcher spins byzantine webs of audiovisual stimuli from an ultimately modest dramatic core, and not only is the larger narrative design unclear before it’s finally revealed, it’s easy to get stuck dwelling on the minutia along the way.
  23. Full Time
    Full Time doesn’t have much to say about organized labor, or labor in general, other than that work can be really stressful.
  24. The Territory
    Alex Pritz’s documentary provides an affecting look at indigenous lives at the frontline of deforestation in the Amazon.
  25. Predators
    Always exhibiting a deftness of touch and willingness to continue probing a cultural taboo that’s now, more than ever, a delicate and charged topic, Obit also challenges our preconceptions of a much-maligned group.
  26. Project Nim
    To drive home the pathos of Nim's mistreatment, James Marsh frequently makes questionable use of the creature's apparent similarity to human beings, trading complex analysis for easy sentiment.
  27. The Lighthouse
    Robert Eggers loosens the noose of veracity that choked his meticulously researched but painfully self-serious debut just enough to allow for so much absurdism to peek through.
  28. Viet and Nam
    Truong Minh Quy’s new queer romance-cum-sociohistorical lament mines beauty from both collective desolation and individual endurance.
  29. Saint Frances
    It has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.
  30. Mandy
    Panos Cosmatos's film is a profoundly violent and weirdly moving poem of male alienation.
  31. 20 Feet from Stardom
    This joyous documentary leaves us wanting to immediately seek out the incredible, sometimes unfamiliar music we've just heard.
  32. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Director Brett Morgen distinguishes the biographical documentary by viewing himself as more of a curator than a film director.
  33. 20th Century Women
    Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women incurs sorrow at the prospect of saying goodbye to its characters.
  34. Pina
    Go after Pina and you're going to have to go through a mob of modern-dance zealots first.
  35. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    The documentary is committed not to some pseudo-factual documentary tradition, but to a more engaging realist poesis.
  36. A Room with a View
    A Room with a View is a masterful example of how to take well-regarded literary source material, render it in a manner that displays the visual markers of middlebrow sophistication, like ornamental costume design and fine-tuned “art direction,” as the Oscars like to call it, and intersperse it with surface-level controversies, like three heterosexual men chasing each other around a pond with their dicks out.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hugo
    Scorsese's affection for cinema is, of course, no surprise, and Hugo doesn't shy away from stumping for the cause of his Film Foundation; which isn't to say it's a vanity project, at least not any more than any film with a budget in the nine figures is.
  38. Tenebrae
    Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It’s both a riveting horror film and an architect’s worst nightmare.
  39. The LEGO Movie
    All told, there's an ageless warmth to The LEGO Movie akin to that of the LEGO brand itself.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gloria
    With its compelling and original approach to its romance narrative, coupled with Paulina García's nuanced and intuitive performance, the film delicately balances an entire octave of emotions.
  41. Manhattan
    Gordon Willis's too-dark lensing is an ideal match for the Scenes from a Marriage-inspired sequences of marital and amorous discord.
  42. The Day He Arrives
    The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives.
  43. The Selfish Giant
    The ear for language is paired with an eye for the landscape, and the film finds beauty even in such a seemingly dreary, economically depressed community.
  44. Sol LeWitt
    What first feels like a neurotic avoidance of Sol LeWitt the man instead becomes a kind of mirage of his life, as though he managed to evaporate into his body of work.
  45. Ixcanul
    The film's structure, however stifling, is filled with gorgeous imagery and nuanced symbolism.
  46. The Future Perfect
    The Future Perfect has the texture of a novella that keeps reworking the same idea in successively intricate ways.
  47. Evil Does Not Exist
    Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Evil Does Not Exist is a turn away from the filmmaker’s empathy of his earlier work toward an aesthetic that’s jagged and chilly.
  48. Crossing
    Crossing is never less than nobly intent on showing trans people as worthy of dignity, safety, and love.
  49. The Visitor
    The Visitor ultimately posits a vision of transcendence through anarchy, seeing repression as the enemy of social progress.
  50. Seymour: An Introduction
    Ethan Hawke's concentration on Seymour Bernstein isn't a betrayal of his own ego massaging, but rather an attempt to have a genuine soul-bearing conversation.
  51. 56 Up
    The series is both a testimonial to the vagaries of chance and an endlessly cyclical study into the implications of being studied.
  52. I Was a Simple Man
    The film’s quietly uncanny narrative wondrously depicts not only a dying man’s reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself.
  53. Grey Gardens
    Grey Gardens remains one of the greatest and possibly only disaster movies that clearly benefits from not having seen the moments of reaping.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Burning Bush
    The decentralized narrative benefits from the film's original conception as a miniseries, with plenty of time to draw us into the morass that was the communist state.
  55. Enter the Dragon
    The lack of sentimentality helps focus the viewer on what the film depicts exceptionally well, namely wanton bad behavior and enthralling, wall-to-wall ass-kicking.
  56. Cutie and the Boxer
    Funny, moving, honest, and occasionally inspiring, but as a portrait of a talent emerging from the shadow of a more public talent, the scale of the shadow is curiously omitted.
  57. One Night in Miami
    As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    It’s Sirk-on-a-shoestring, and twice as cynical.
  59. The Reason I Jump
    The film weaves together the stories of five mostly nonverbal autistic teens to present a rich tapestry of the autistic experience.
  60. Belle
    For all of the film’s visually striking action and musical set pieces, it’s the generosity of spirit with which it approaches the modern teenage experience that’s its most impressive attribute.
  61. Private Life
    Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.
  62. Moonage Daydream
    Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.
  63. Meeting with Pol Pot
    Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.
  64. BlacKkKlansman
    Spike Lee styles the film as a popular entertainment, forgoing the theatrical satire typical of his late-period state-of-the-nation joints, like Bamboozled and Chi-Raq, and settling into the accessible rhythms of the contemporary sitcom.
  65. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    There’s an alive-ness that emanates from the characters, in large part due to all those visible fingerprints and indentations on their skins—a tactile counterbalance to a story about humanity’s over-reliance on technology.
  66. Janet Planet
    Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.
  67. The Novelist's Film
    The film proves that Hong Sang-soo has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details.
  68. Under the Skin
    Throughout, what truly matters to director Jonathan Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.
  69. Red Army
    Gabe Polsky's quiet yet welcome achievement is to allow us to see the individual amid the politics, clearly and sympathetically.
  70. 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.
  71. The Post
    No American film since Zodiac has exhibited such a love for the way information travels than The Post, but it's nonetheless steeped in self-congratulation.
  72. The Flat
    Accusation is the rhetoric of outrage, and Arnon Goldfinger can't bring himself to experience even conservative anger, regardless of its appropriateness.
  73. Cunningham
    While some individuals are inevitably more compelling than others, as a whole the entire series, and “63 Up” in particular, is completely enveloping as it draws us into the latest happenings of these people we’ve followed for so long.
  74. Fireworks
    It’s a weird experience that Kitano is offering to movie audiences: We thrill to the violent, heroic exploits that leave many a pierced eyeball, many a severed limb, many a bullet-riddled corpse, but we find uplift in his celebration of community, music, dance, light, color, and companionship.
  75. Blind
    Unfortunately, the film's occasionally thrilling visual sleight-of-hand comes at the ultimate service of a boilerplate early-mid-life-crisis drama.
  76. 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.
  77. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Released in the midst of the Korean War and the prime of McCarthy, the film achieved a unique relevance for a “spaceman” movie by unambiguously advocating for peace and grounding its pulp story in social reality.
  78. Footnote
    Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.
  79. Being 17
    André Téchiné does justice to the closeness between repulsion and desire, difference and sameness, heterosexuality and homosexuality.
  80. Original Cast Album: Company
    Throughout, Pennebaker’s camera moves in as close as it can to capture every moment of doubt, disappointment and rage in Stritch’s face. That even still viewers debate whether Stritch was playing up the drama of the moment for the cameras only underlines how deftly Pennebaker’s brief and unassuming film resides at the heart of the interplay between work, art, and performance.
  81. Saint Maud
    Rose Glass utilizes a provocative scenario for a vague and deadly serious art exercise.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Misericordia
    Misericordia finds Alain Guiraudie revisiting old standbys under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever.
  83. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    The film lays out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s body of work.
  84. Mustang
    The film punctuates the sisters' confinement with various episodes united by their contrivance.
  85. Palm Springs
    The film smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle.
  86. James White
    It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.
  87. It Follows
    Though visionary, David Robert Mitchell's film abounds in undigested ideas and dubious sexual politics.
  88. Driveways
    The film’s devotion to the belief that kindness can be a balm for almost any hurt is deeply moving.
  89. Blue Sun Palace
    Blue Sun Palace’s tale is filled with quiet spaces, and the way the texture of this quiet changes over the course of the film is a testament to its power.
  90. Don't Think Twice
    It displays an intimate chemical understanding of the exhausting and unrelentingly impotent agony of failure.
  91. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    This is a sports tale in which the character building has almost nothing to do with the sport.
  92. Charade
    Shot by Charles Lang, one of the greatest American cinematographers to ever live, Charade is some sort of miraculous entertainment, self-aware and self-parodying yet never distancing or detached. Hepburn is the audience’s funny and flighty proxy, allowing us the great pleasure of being seduced by Grant’s unpredictable charmer.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Intervista
    Here, Fellini effortlessly weaves together various registers, aesthetic and otherwise, continually undercutting whatever level of “reality” seems to be in front of the camera(s) at any given time.
  94. Souleymane's Story
    Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.
  95. Holy Cow
    The rhythms and structure of Holy Cow embody the swirling confusion and contradictions of adolescence itself.
  96. Sanjuro
    Sanjuro is still a lesson from a master in mounting choreography and sustaining momentum, though it remains more of an exercise rather than a work of flesh and blood.
  97. In the Summers
    One of the film’s great strengths resides in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry.
  98. Court
    Chaitanya Tamhane's grand canvas is Indian society as represented by its legal system, and what it reveals is none too flattering.
  99. Locke
    The literalizing of Ivan Locke's hidden self and his inability to master it ultimately exposes the film as the squarest kind of theater: drama therapy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    20,000 Days on Earth
    While the film is seemingly accessible as a portrait of an artist who seems particularly attuned to his own creative process, and particularly adept at describing this attunement, it's unlikely that many who aren't already whole-hog Bad Seeds fans would be able to stomach much of Cave's self-styled pomposity.
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