Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
For 7,769 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 51 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
    It's difficult to discern precisely where this all went wrong, and even more difficult to speculate about possible improvements.
  2. Flowers of Shanghai
    Flowers of Shanghai operates on the whole much like Yoshihiro’s music, filling your senses like a thick haze, holding you rapt without petitioning for your attention.
  3. 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.
  4. Funny Games
    Haneke's admonishments are disturbing only in the sense that they're never self-critical, and while watching one of his films, there's always a sense that he thinks he's above his characters, his audience, and scrutiny.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Big Lebowski
    There are few films that genuinely get better with each successive viewing. The Big Lebowski is one of them. This is owed not only to its near-infinite quotability, which itself grows with time, given how much of the film’s humor is self-referential, but also because its tangled plot requires a substantial amount of unraveling before it can be fully understood and appreciated.
  6. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The title alone of Kirby Dick’s alleged documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist practically screams: This is not your standard biopic!
  7. 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.
  8. Underground
    Underground is a unique blend of lowbrow slapstick and sophisticated war commentary, earning it well-deserved comparisons to Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant To Be and Not To Be (possibly the funniest movie ever made) and the films of Abbott and Costello.
    • 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.
  10. The Watermelon Woman
    It's a film of such multitudinous interests and storytelling pursuits that its unfolding replicates the ecstasy of newfound romance.
  11. Cyclo
    An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare.
  12. The Cable Guy
    The director, who intermittently shows up on Steven’s television as Stan and Sam Sweet, a hybrid of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, shoots all of this with verve and fluidity to spare, though he succeeds most commendably in framing and editing his star’s physical antics.
  13. Mission: Impossible
    Unlike most action films, Mission: Impossible's distinct appeal operates not so much on suspense but on improbability.
  14. Dead Man
    Dead Man is likely Jim Jarmusch’s most stunning achievement.
  15. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    In the theater, whenever Mike, Crow or Tom Servo flub a punchline or resort to a fart joke, you almost want to lean forward and shush them.
  16. James and the Giant Peach
    Though certainly not a travesty of any sort, James and the Giant Peach does strike me as the weakest thus far of Dahl’s to-screen adaptations and this mostly has to do with the problems Selick encounters with mixing the world of imagination with the real world.
  17. Dekalog (1988)
    The biblical root of the [Dekalog] may suggest didacticism on its face, but whatever morals are advanced are decidedly ambivalent.
  18. Fargo
    Fargo, more than any of the Coens’ other work, is a study in contrast, namely in the sense that it’s made by two people who were clearly at one time insiders, but who have now taken the opportunity to see the Midwestern template from the outside. As such, every interaction in the film registers as a direct reflection of incongruous elements and repressed tensions.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Chungking Express
    To Wong, love isn't something you can talk about; words are inadequate, empty, inevitably reductive. Love is something you see, sense, feel, and Chungking Express is one of Wong's purest evocations of its excitement and heartbreak.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Bottle Rocket
    Anderson has a great deal of empathy for his charming band of fuck-ups, but the characters are thinly drawn, and Anderson's attempts to lend the story emotional weight, like giving Anthony a ludicrously one-dimensional love interest in South American housekeeper Inez (Lumi Cavazos), largely fall flat.
  21. 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.
  22. I Am Cuba
    I Am Cuba is a cinephile’s wet dream, a collage of Herculean feats of technical wizardry that would be easy to dismiss if it wasn’t so humane.
  23. Toy Story
    The film is virtually perfect: Nary a frame goes to waste in the establishment and development of plot and character, with the occasionally deviant touch serving to neutralize a sense of overly manufactured calculation.
  24. Total Eclipse
    Despite its fascinating subject matter, Total Eclipse is both unflattering and loveless. Holland seems to care very little for the way Rimbaud and Verlaine’s crass relationship was channeled into words. Worse than DiCaprio’s accent are his and Thewlis’s ludicrous sex scenes.
  25. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
    The Curse of Michael Myers’s supernatural angle is understandably its weakest link, seeing as it was the aspect of the film that test audiences disliked the most.
  26. Showgirls
    Showgirls is truly one of the only ’90s films that treats pop culture as a vibrant field of social economics and cerebral pursuit, and not merely tomorrow’s nostalgia-masturbation fodder.
  27. Hyenas
    Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 film resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing.
  28. River of Grass
    Kelly Reichardt's film is a wry, appealingly raggedy look at the impossibility of conjuring up excitement from boredom.
  29. Living in Oblivion
    Director Tom DiCillo ingeniously structures the film as a trio of overlapping shorts that cumulatively suggest ripples emanating from a stone tossed in a pond.
  30. Safe
    We know nothing of this woman’s inner-traumas, the repressed memories or hidden pains of her youth, yet Moore, in an extraordinary milestone performance, gives us a glimpse inside Carol’s frail and lonely soul.
  31. Benny's Video (1992)
    Benny’s Video is a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media, without even the common decency to offer shrill sensationalism to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions.
  32. 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.
  33. Arizona Dream
    Recalling the ‘70s shaggy-dog stories of Makavejev, Ashby, and Schatzberg, Kusturica’s French-financed American venture deserved better than the neglect it suffered in the blockbuster age.
  34. The Lion King
    Although far from the worst offender in Disney's canon, The Lion King is nevertheless host to many of the less savory qualities common to the studio's output.
  35. Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead
    Don Coscarelli outdoes the humor of John Hughes in what feels like a more honest version of the gleeful sadism in Home Alone.
  36. Serial Mom
    Serial Mom is the strongest film of the post-midnight-movie chapter of John Waters’s career.
  37. Bitter Moon
    As easy as it would be to make rude connections between the film’s raunchy shenanigans and Polanski’s own history, the fact is that Bitter Moon doesn’t feel like either an explanation, an apology, nor a defense of the kinky sexual games adults play. Think of it as Polanski’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
  38. Romeo Is Bleeding
    Romeo Is Bleeding projects an aura of obsessive self-consciousness that occasionally suggests the superior film that eluded its creators.
    • 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.
  40. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
    From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.
  41. A Perfect World
    Hancock lays the groundwork for Eastwood to transform what might have been an admirable, tightly told entertainment into something far more emotionally resonant, slyly self-aware, and rich in subtext.
  42. Carlito's Way
    Though the story in Carlito’s Way is treated in a fatalistic sense, the moment-to-moment, frame-to-frame experience is anything but rigid and stodgy from over-determination. It sings, dances, punches, slinks, embeds. It moves like the luxurious tracking shots that punctuate the film.
  43. Trauma
    Trauma is both an underachieving Deep Red and an unpolished facsimile of Stendhal Syndrome, and where Tenebre invites active spectatorship, Trauma is convoluted to the point of distraction, worth savoring solely for Argento’s excesses of gore.
  44. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    Whereas the film is a marvel to look at, it’s unfortunately not much in the song or story department, as Danny Elfman’s musical numbers are—save for the opening’s boisterous “This Is Halloween”—generally banal and unmemorable, and the plot, despite only having to fill out a paltry 76 minutes, ultimately as emaciated and insubstantial as its leading bags of bones.
    • 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.
  46. The Age of Innocence
    Martin Scorsese captures the exquisite agony and pleasure of passion that’s forced to remain theoretical.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Thing Called Love
    Such strained touches notwithstanding, The Thing Called Love charms and touches, not the least for revealing Bogdanovich as a rare filmmaker still interested in human behavior, keeping the action mostly in medium shots and extended takes to better catch the emotional nuances from character to character.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Body Bags
    That Body Bags largely succeeds, despite the perceptible lack of novel material, can be attributed to the strength of the assembled performances as well as the filmmakers’ attention to the dynamics of visual storytelling.
  49. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
    It should be said that this negligible absence of Brooks’s boundary hopping wit and untamed performances doesn’t quite render Men in Tights unwatchable. There’s an appropriate, albeit languid merriment to the proceedings kept alive by a few choice cameos (Dick van Patten, Dom DeLouise, Brooks himself) and a handful of gags that land on their feet.
  50. Hard Boiled
    There’s a moral “quality” to the bloodshed that you won’t find in your average Hollywood action film.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Orlando
    Rarely have source material, director, and leading actress been more in alignment than in Orlando.
    • 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.
  53. The Oak
    The film’s naïve utopianism is infectious, demanding that we live as though life were worth it in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
  54. Aladdin
    Aladdin is ultimately less offensive than patently ridiculous, mostly because its ethnic white noise is really just an excuse for Robin Williams—as a postmodern blabbermouthed genie who grants Aladdin three wishes—to put on the most elaborate, narcissistic circus act in the history of cinema.
  55. Bad Lieutenant
    It is boldly NC-17, but unlike most exploitation cinema, Ferrara can’t seem to help himself from making the film a personal, frightened psychic diary, a pitiful shriek for help, and a powerful statement about how even the damned can achieve a moment of fleeting grace.
  56. Malcolm X
    With Malcolm X, Lee doesn’t so much inject his sensibilities into the lifeline of his subject, but rather comes to see how his place as a film director can be integrated within the social movement of X’s message.
    • 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.
  58. Candyman
    Rose’s dizzy, Jungle Fever-ish romanticism is juxtaposed against his cold, Cronenbergian dystopia to create Candyman‘s uniquely baroque use of modern urban blight, subtle political undercurrents, and hints of fallen woman melodrama. It creates a startlingly effective shocker that gains power upon further, sleepless-night reflection.
  59. 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sneakers
    It’s a surprise to discover a cerebral, 25-year-old film following the blueprint for today’s endless glut of superhero movies. It certainly operates on this level for the masses.
  61. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    A torrid journey through the subconscious of a little girl lost, Fire Walk with Me is also a cautionary tale of sorts, the sad chronicle of a sleepy town trying to rid itself of its dirty laundry.
  62. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven brought the revisionist revenge film into the 1990s and, by extension, the 21st century
  63. Raising Cain
    Rather than clarifying, De Palma’s technique with Raising Cain effectively obliterates the audience’s bearings. Which gives the film’s final sequence—on the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento’s killer reveal at the climax of Tenebre—a nasty twist.
  64. No Fear, No Die
    As with Claire Denis’s previous Chocolat, emphasis is placed both on how the French legacy of colonialism persists into the present, as well as how Black men are often filtered through the white imagination to ruinous ends.
  65. Death Becomes Her
    Death Becomes Her is one of the few mainstream comedies that you don’t feel even had to try to be outlandish. It was simply born that way.
  66. Society
    Society never entirely decides whether it’s a plot-centric horror-mystery or an imagistic fantasy; the film’s self-conscious emptiness drains the incestuous conceit of its shock value, defanging a nervy gross-out.
  67. Europa
    Von Trier and his three cinematographers fashioned a handmade, retro pastiche with a small, dried-out heart.
  68. 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.
  69. Daughters of the Dust
    This is a work of art that's as much a cinematic probe, and a challenge to mythologizing past eras, as it is an ancestral history lesson.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    JFK
    JFK still retains a primal power; no number of derivative, headache-inducing CSI episodes can blunt the impact of Stone's aggressive visuals, and the film's plea for accountability and honesty in government is as vital now as ever.
  71. 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.
  72. 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.
  73. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
    Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is one passable joke stretched out over 98 minutes with nothing in the way of a real movie to support it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Point Break
    In terms of Hollywood history, Bigelow's film is the perfect document of its time.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    City Slickers
    Equally self-reflective and enjoyable is the score by Marc Shaiman and Thomas Richard Sharp that cuts a sweeping western theme into the waltz and college-sports tunes that color the film’s animated title sequence and then throughout its more comic set pieces—not even cutting out entirely during Crystal and company’s rendition of the Bonanza theme song. Rather, like the film itself, it beautifully accents Crystal’s high notes.
  76. Madonna: Truth or Dare
    In essence, Truth or Dare is less of a concert film than an elaborately constructed exegesis on pop mythmaking and the construction of identity.
  77. The Garden
    Derek Jarman’s 1990 film isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.
    • 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.
  79. Night of the Living Dead
    So yeah, if you can’t tell already, my giddiness has by this point evaporated, but my staunch belief in this muddled little gem has not yet substantially wavered.
  80. An Angel at My Table
    Jane Campion upends staid genre convention with an impressionistic approach to character.
  81. White Hunter Black Heart
    White Hunter, Black Heart finds Eastwood reaching a peak in the fields of both film direction and acting.
  82. Opera
    Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Witches
    At the center of Roeg’s stylistic excess is Houston, balancing effortlessly between high camp and horror.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Exorcist III
    Few people love William Friedkin, John Boorman, and Paul Schrader as much as I do, but in my book, of the six or so films that have tried to turn that tortured title into a continuing franchise, Blatty’s The Exorcist III is the best, hands down.
  85. Metropolitan
    Metropolitan celebrates and mourns the specific character of a place and time, youthful associations and crushes, a toolkit of values, even if those values are not exactly shared by, say, housewives in Duluth and auto mechanics in Albuquerque.
  86. Presumed Innocent
    Pakula plays to Ford’s strengths, allowing the actor to use his face more than his words to convey the doubt, shame, and self-loathing Rusty experiences. The film may be more outright gripping during the courtroom scenes, but the quieter scenes between Ford and Scacchi leave more lasting impressions.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia isn’t great filmmaking, appearing to be kept in check by vaguely resembling Spielbergian entertainment without rising to its altitudes. But it’s a pleasant, acutely nostalgic elicitation of the VHS era and the woozy, preadolescent excitement of awaiting the next cranked-out Spielberg Xerox picture.
  88. Dick Tracy
    A highly impressive effort.
  89. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    It’s a giddy, diabolical, and terminally underappreciated sequel to the film that made Joe Dante’s career.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Each mini-movie has the same tally of moments of greatness, grossness, and dullness, giving Tales from the Darkside: The Movie an even-handed feel.
  91. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    The film doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer as it reminds us of our culpability as spectators.
  92. Sidewalk Stories
    Charles Lane’s 1989 indie Sidewalk Stories doesn’t just hark back to The Kid; it formally revives the Chaplin classic in the street theater of Dinkins-era Greenwich Village.
  93. Steel Magnolias
    MacLaine grabbing Dukakis by the bangs, shoving her head back with a sneering “Have your roots done,” radiates more feminine fellowship than a dozen sisterhoods of the travelling pants. Not bad for a movie that alternates the tragedy of dying young and beautiful against the comedy of growing old and bitter.
  94. Mystery Train
    Mystery Train is a singularly enthusiastic American anthem that trenchantly interprets the cult of audiophilia as filthy gas stoves roasting marshmallows, raspy radio DJs hawking fried calamari, and ill-equipped racial armies ignorantly clashing by night.
  95. The Little Mermaid
    The Little Mermaid is the story of one packrat pre-tween princess whose undersea kingdom is only matched in depth by her remarkable sense of consumer-minded entitlement.
  96. My Left Foot
    One hundred and six minutes is entirely too short a time span for Sheridan to cover Christy's entire life, but the performances are so profound they successfully fill in any and all gaps.
  97. 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).
  98. 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.
  99. Casualties of War
    It stands as maybe the only great film by the director that I feel an unconscious crisis of conscience that makes me want to view it without an auteurist context.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »