Slant Magazine's Scores

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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 6.5 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
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  1. 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shag
    As for Fonda, the camera certainly loves her (to quote a famous line by Howard Hawks), but an actor needs a part that will make her a star, and few films since Shag have seen fit to play to her strengths, specifically that perky blond American sass of hers that found perfect expression here.
  3. Lethal Weapon 2
    But while the story may not be especially memorable, Jeffrey Boam’s brisk screenplay and Donner’s workmanlike direction keep things moving enough to gather enough momentum in preparation for Gibson’s third-act, tear-down-the-house rampage.
  4. Do the Right Thing
    Lee deftly follows the actions of two dozen people on what turns out to be one of the longest, hottest, most memorable and maybe most tragic days of their lives. And he does it without so much as a single lugubrious or extraneous moment.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    For All Mankind
    If not the screen’s ultimate portrait of space travel, For All Mankind remains a peerless planetarium show.
  6. Miracle Mile
    Miracle Mile is one of the most fascinating curios of the ’80s, a disaster movie that turns the decade’s optimism back onto itself.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    See No Evil, Hear No Evil
    Trapped inside its overwritten crime story is a breezy character study starring two men with genuine chemistry and a flair for both physical and verbal comedy. In the rare moments when Pryor and Wilder simply talk to each other, there’s the potential for a funny and poignant interracial two-hander like I’m Not Rappaport. It’s too bad that potential is squandered on a senseless murder plot.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Major League
    Comedy is the lasting virtue here—and more specifically what veteran screenwriter Ward (The Sting, Sleepless in Seattle) got out of a solid comic framework to make Major League continue to work beyond its odd collection of characters and a very specific setting.
  9. Castle in the Sky
    Miyazaki’s concerns with the fragility and wonder of our less tangible surroundings haunt the picture without overpowering it.
  10. Leviathan
    A mediocre, quasi-diverting B movie.
  11. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    The thorough goofiness the film luxuriates in, as compared to the covert self-seriousness of nearly every teen comedy ever made, sets Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure apart and heads and tails above the glut of its ilk. Most triumphant, indeed.
  12. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    The sequel’s cure proves infinitely bloodier than the original’s disease, and its over-the-top depictions of brimstone and flesh are so loopy and unmoored, you’d swear the place where nobody dared to go suddenly became Xanadu.
  13. Oliver & Company
    Oliver & Company is as out-of-touch as anything the studio ever made.
  14. Child's Play
    Child’s Play is only a shade more terrifying than Teddy Ruxpin.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    They Live
    It’s an effective ploy, forcing us to confront certain basic facts about the state of the world around us without sounding preachy, and it articulates a decidedly working-class anger in response to social iniquity without sounding self-righteous. And it does all of this while retaining the surface appeal of its B-movie origins, frequently (and entertainingly) indulging in the seductive spectacle of ghouls and guns in combat—though always with ulterior motives.
  16. The Lair of the White Worm
    Cheap effects and gratuitous displays of nudity only heighten the film’s delirious demeanor.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. One of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades.
  18. Waxwork
    Waxwork is certainly no hidden horror gem, but its flashes of wit and genuine enthusiasm for the horror genre are enough to make it a reasonably enjoyable time.
  19. Poltergeist III
    At its best, Poltergeist III recalls that surreal mix of DIY ingenuity and narrative ineptitude that mark some of Lucio Fulci’s lesser efforts. At its worst, well, it’s just another soulless, hacky-tacky horror sequel.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Crocodile Dundee II
    The sequel exacerbates problems already too evident in the first movie, most painfully the near-total disposability of Kozlowski’s Sue, who spends most of the time reacting to Mick’s quirks with chuckles. No battle of wits, no rejoinders. Sue accepts Mick’s ways wholesale; there’s never any hint at a possible tension between their lifestyles.
  21. Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is the type of movie that you would want to watch through the slits in a sewer grate, only its execution sits perched well above its scummy aim, and the end result is that you feel guilty for wishing for something more perverted.
  22. Critters 2
    Critters 2: The Main Course offers a heaping helping of everything that’s missing from the first film: a reasonably intelligent and witty script, a supple and unchained playfulness, and an anarchic mélange of diverse genre riffs.
  23. Powaqqatsi
    Powaqqatsi is every bit as viscerally engaging though less provocative than its predecessor.
  24. Brain Damage
    This gnarly gem of 1980s-era punk horror still looks and sounds a little rough, but the film and the supplements justify the plunge.
    • 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.
  26. Beetlejuice
    McDowall deftly keeps one foot in the here and the other in the hereafter, which allows Burton a unique opportunity to juggle two sets of funhouse effects.
  27. 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.
  28. School Daze
    School Daze is, if nothing else, a compelling time capsule of racial politics in the late ‘80s, ethnographically sealed-off in a hothouse micro-environment (an all-black college campus) that’s as constrictive as Lee’s varying plot threads and stylistic whims are profuse.
  29. Au Revoir les Enfants
    Part dream, part nightmare, the film vividly remembers a traumatic moment in time that cannot be forgotten.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Empire of the Sun
    While screenwriter Tom Stoppard supplies a literate script, it’s Spielberg’s peerless command of film technique that drives the film, with the director crafting a number of sequences that function as impressive examples of pure visual storytelling.
  31. Manon of the Spring
    This tonal shift transforms Manon of the Spring from a caustic morality play into something more reflective, an elegy to a way of life whose residents did not fully appreciate until they themselves had helped to end it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    House of Games
    His meticulous, largely self-taught directing style—dazzlingly showcased in House of Games, a master class in dramatically functional compositions and camera moves—should be mandatory viewing for any would-be filmmaker.
  33. Near Dark
    A romance, a western, and a totem to lost youth in an era ravaged by infection and addiction, it’s a high-water mark in a decade filled with exemplary genre fare. Borrowing from, and surpassing, the exceptional chemistry of Aliens’s tightly knit cast, the melancholic Near Dark is gorgeous even in its savagery, and one of pulp cinema’s greatest achievements.
  34. Hellraiser
    Barker’s vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser‘s overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.
  35. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
    Imagine parents sitting in the audience with their naughty children (who used their Cabbage Patch dolls as driveway obstructions for their Big Wheel obstacle courses) and feeling ruefully double-crassed.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dragnet
    Dragnet winks at its source material often, but besides a committed lead performance by Dan Aykroyd and the return of Webb’s partner, Harry Morgan, little remains of the original show. This ain’t your grandmother’s Dragnet; it’s your deranged drunk uncle’s Dragnet.
  37. Harry and the Hendersons
    Unabashedly lefty sentiment colors the whole film.
  38. The Untouchables
    Steeped in De Palma's glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk.
  39. The Dolls
    Dolls is still ultimately minor-key Gordon, exhibiting nowhere near the level of ambition or invention of many of his hot-house splatter classics, but it has been rendered with an artisanal level of craftsmanship that distinguishes it as an almost-hidden horror gem, ready for rediscovery.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Tampopo
    At bottom, Itami’s film is a zesty, albeit wholesomely satisfying, concoction concerned with the virtues of community and cooperation. Nonetheless, Tampopo also explores some darker regions in a number of vignettes that illuminate the often surreal intersections of sex, death, and other human appetites.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Gate
    If you can get in touch with your inner 12-year-old, The Gate is a pleasant diversion.
  42. My Life as a Dog
    My Life as a Dog and its sublime vision of childhood will always be there to remind us of the filmmaker Hallström once was, and potentially could be again.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Evil Dead II
    Sam Raimi’s sequel/remake is full-on gore slapstick, more Tex Avery than Dario Argento.
  44. Angel Heart
    It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.
  45. Come and See
    It suggests that a war’s horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind.
  46. Slaughter High
    Despite the pretense of commentary, the film asks no underlying questions about the society that produces slasher films and revels in its narrative’s basic premise to numbing ends.
  47. Sid and Nancy
    Sid & Nancy, in its first half, offers an immersive plunge into the punk lifestyle, capturing with wit and verve its anti-authoritarian sneer and DIY ethos, before then slowly circling the drain during a dour second half given over to disillusion and dissolution.
  48. Betty Blue
    Indeed, the film flies by and feels weightless, like a spectacular rainbow-colored hydrogen balloon that passes out of our memory the moment we lose sight of it.
  49. 52 Pick-Up
    52 Pick-Up loses its sense of social texture in the last third when everyone begins to die by decree of formulaic three-act screenwriting, and its indifference to the plight of Harry’s wife (Ann-Margret) is unseemly, but the film is an often nightmarish gem awaiting rediscovery.
  50. The Sacrifice
    In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission.
  51. From Beyond
    The functional plot and Gordon’s non-flashy directorial style aren’t what make From Beyond such a memorable cult item; as with Re-Animator, it’s more the audacity of staging elaborate sequences that mix up steamy sexual proclivities and monster madness.
  52. 'Round Midnight
    Jazz music is a state of mind in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ’Round Midnight.
  53. 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.
  54. Manhunter
    Mann’s focus is so esoteric that he slowly turns the garish thriller into a kind of poetry.
    • 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.
  56. The Fly
    In its galvanizing portrait of a body ravaged and sexual stasis infected by bugs, The Fly might be Cronenberg’s most direct horror film ever.
  57. She's Gotta Have It
    Lee’s first film statement conveys the communal experience.
  58. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
    Though it has the requisite murder every 10 minutes or so (including victims snapped in half and punched through the heart, and a triple decapitation), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives feels more like a harbinger for the Scream series with its self-aware jokiness.
  59. Meantime
    Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema.
  60. Aliens
    Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Mouse Detective
    Mouse Detective, though, just tries to get by with nothing more than the novelty of having rodents play detective, and then pulls the rug out from under it by showing, however briefly, the human Holmes and Watson.
  62. Invaders from Mars
    Committed horror nerds and conspiracy-minded liberals alike will find fleeting suggestions of the canny parable that nearly manages to surface.
  63. Demons
    Demons is a coffee-table book of a horror movie, reveling in a purity of transcendent revulsion that marks it as something that’s really only suitable for the truest and most devoted of aficionados. It’s a snob’s objet d’art, disguised as a blood offering.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling
    Like his stand-up, Pryor deftly mixes humor and tragedy, subtly tweaking familiar tales from his routines.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    8 Million Ways to Die
    It’s a fine swan song for Ashby.
  66. Legend
    What with the film's cotton-candy mise en the scene, rhyming goblins (“Mortal world turned to ice/Here be goblin paradise”), sexless pixies and elementary light/dark metaphors that reference the order of its universe, Legend is a gothic fairy tale brought to life.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Wise Guys
    The macho bluster taken seriously in De Palma’s gorgeous but uninterestingly pumped-up Elliott Ness saga is here intriguingly skewered.
  68. Critters
    Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise.
  69. My Beautiful Laundrette
    Thatcherism yielded results that are arguably typical of conservative ideology: high-class flourishing at the expense of the lower class proletariat, who’re left underpaid (at best), over-taxed, adrift, and profoundly resentful of their limited opportunities. My Beautiful Laundrette is a moving, tonally elastic study of this environment’s socio-political ground floor.
  70. 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.
  71. Desert Hearts
    It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pretty in Pink
    Whereas Mean Girls used a visual metaphor turning students into ravaging lions as a dull-headed joke, Hughes created a lion’s den that felt perilously real.
  73. House
    House has a superb premise that begs for a more ambitious framework, both formally and psychologically.
  74. Clue
    Clue is comfortable with its pedigree, even giddily enthused by it, which gives its creators freedom to produce not a nostalgic entertainment, but a sustained and sincerely old-fashioned entertainment, laced with wicked miscreancy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Young Sherlock Holmes
    As a work of fictional imagination, Holmes is simply fascinating, and Young Sherlock Holmes attempts to unlock the source of that fascination. The film re-imagines the first encounter between Holmes and Watson from within the dusty honeycombs of a boarding school buried deep within the folds of Victorian London. What one finds there are fascinatingly incomplete portraits.
  76. Smooth Talk
    Throughout, Joyce Chopra patiently and shrewdly observes the contradictions of human behavior that Laura Dern brilliantly conveys.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Live and Die in L.A.
    To Live and Die in L.A. exhibits a remarkable degree of kineticism, evident in several memorable chase sequences, the film’s headlong momentum abetted by Wang Chung’s dynamic score.
  78. 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Flesh+Blood
    In the end, Verhoeven’s greatest irony, and the often pedestrian narrative’s most brilliant stroke, isn’t to decide in favor or against Martin. He’s of a piece with his nature, and he leaves the story as he entered it: unchanged and unbowed by the carnage he’s both witness to and agent of
  80. The Return of the Living Dead
    Suffice to say, this small offering from the horror genre is a hoot to watch, with never a dull moment.
  81. Phenomena
    The whole of Phenomena is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often terrifying and exhilarating.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes Part II
    Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 is a bland, bloodless shambles. Sequel-making of the laziest sort, it’s nothing more than a perfunctory, undisguised cash-grab.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Follow That Bird
    While kids will and have enjoyed the film as a sweet-and-occasionally-exciting road trip with all their favorite Sesame Street friends, parents are presented with far deeper themes to consider.
  85. Day of the Dead
    Any real zombie fan knows that political parable and decomposing cannibal corpse gore go together like peanut butter and jelly, but Day of the Dead found the subgenre’s reigning master and poet-in-residence mismanaging the proper ratios a bit.
  86. Back to the Future
    Back to the Future stands up on its own as a well-oiled, brilliantly-edited example of new-school, Spielberg-cultivated thrill-craft, one that endures even now that its visual effects and haw-haw references to Pepsi Free and reruns seem as dated as full-service gas stations apparently did in 1985.
  87. Cocoon
    The film has something for everyone but, in effect, offers nothing of substance to anyone. The interplay between Ameche, Cronyn, and Brimley allow for some lively, even touching scenes in a product—and make no mistake, a product is exactly what it is—that is, at best, adequate.
  88. Lifeforce
    Watching Lifeforce now is to be reminded that even big-budget films were once allowed to be adventurous and idiosyncratic, even in the 1980s, and that American horror movies were once capable of being fun, sexy, and subversively empathetic.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Secret Admirer
    It’s relatively good. Of course, “relatively good” in the mid-‘80s teen-movie genre often means “not unwatchable,” and Secret Admirer doesn’t quite qualify as fresh or unpredictable...But it also has a handful of gratifying moments and nuances you don’t expect from the genre, starting with girls who eat and curse like boys.
  90. Girls Just Want to Have Fun
    But even from an objective viewpoint, Girls Just Want to Have Fun isn’t really a bad film, at least not in the ways in which we tend to define bad films. The acting is more than competent, there’s not much glaringly bad dialogue, the humor is inventive, and the song-and-dance is engaging.
  91. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
    The tone is crude, raunchy, and leering, with kill scenes combined with more nudity than usual; we’re even invited to check out a hot chick’s body after her face has been sliced in half by garden shears.
  92. West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty
    Med Hondo’s is a bravura spectacle of intellectual and cinematic daring.
  93. The Breakfast Club
    The quintessential Brat Pack vehicle, hampered by Hughes’s willingness to pigeonhole his protagonists in exactly the same manner as they accuse Vernon of doing, The Breakfast Club is hopelessly tethered to its era in ways that the same year’s other major high school-themed blockbuster, Back to the Future, isn’t.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dungeonmaster
    The Dungeonmaster is little more than a fitfully entertaining calling card meant to showcase Empire’s talented in-house special effects artists and stop-motion animators.
  95. Blood Simple
    There's a simple magnetism inherent in this kind of filmmaking, and the Coens know how to orchestrate it.
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