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. Blazing Saddles
    A limp, shapeless mess of a film trades in a genuine respect for westerns’ tropes for purile vulgarity and joy-buzzer showmanship.
  2. The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is so perfectly tailored to the star that it could’ve been mapped out from a Pythagorean theorem.
  3. Don't Look Now
    It figures that the sex scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now has become more legendary than the film itself. Forget that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were off-screen lovers at the time, the film’s infamous bedroom romp is every bit as devastating and organic as anything else in the film.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horror Express
    The best that can be said for Horror Express is that it doesn’t take itself at all seriously, and it isn’t too proud to steal outright what other films politely borrow.
  5. Fantastic Planet
    Fantastic Planet’s blend of straightforward, almost elementary storytelling (any missing context is filled in via a voiceover by Jean Valmont as the adult Terr) with heady themes and eroticized imagery marks the film as a relic of an era with much looser standards around the dichotomy of the children’s film and the adult drama.
  6. Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Even the director’s most rabid fans will find Cronenberg’s debut to be a tough sit.
  7. The Holy Mountain
    The Holy Mountain is nothing if not exuberant while cartwheeling its way through the cosmos and back through the non sequitur-strewn plains and deserts, towns and cities, ridges and ranges of Mexico.
  8. Robin Hood
    If Robin Hood’s charmingly sh**ty animation comes damn close to redeeming the film from utter vapidity, it’s a damn shame they couldn’t manage to supply a villain with the balls of an Ursula, a Cruella, or a Maleficent.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Charley Varrick
    Ultracool.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Badlands
    Where it’s not refined in form, Badlands is so by virtue of the specificity of its material (the then-topical sensationalism of teenage sociopaths and their glamorization in popular culture), a fact that has been buried by the dense literature published on Malick. Yet the film never once feels like the faded photos Holly examines under her father’s stereopticon.
  11. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    Bitter Tears offers a sensory feast that’s expanded on by the elaborate dialogue, which is poetic even as translated into English, and by the astonishingly sensual and fluid movements of the actors and the camera.
  12. The Mother and the Whore
    Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films.
  13. 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.
  14. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    Mitchum doesn’t remotely overshadow the film’s first-rate ensemble of character actors.
  15. Playtime
    With Playtime, Tati made one of the most fully inhabitable films ever.
  16. Dillinger
    This rough, lurid, pointedly un-preachy work of macho outlaw cinema, one of the best of the many John Dillinger movies, deserves to be better known.
  17. The Legend of Hell House
    The Legend of Hell House is a regrettably just-competent adaptation of a great American horror novel.
  18. The Offence
    Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).
  19. Soylent Green
    The film strikes a poignant chord with its chilling portrayal of a state-sponsored euthanasia program that utilizes movie-watching as a narcotic designed to help the sick and elderly die peacefully.
  20. Season of the Witch
    Romero’s own Belle du Jour, a tale of a lonely, neglected housewife whose discontent and suppressed erotic desires are efficiently conveyed in a series of bondage-tinged dream sequences.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Scarecrow
    Scarecrow embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon.
  22. Sisters
    Though Sisters is an undeniably tight homage to Hitchcock from an obviously indebted De Palma, I am still inclined to place it at least a tier below the likes of Dressed to Kill and Body Double.
  23. The Crazies
    The Crazies lacks the nightmarish momentum of Romero’s best zombie flicks, but it’s no less astute with its allegorical potshots.
  24. The Long Goodbye
    The film is simultaneously an act of revisionism as well as a parody of then-revitalizing neo-noir.
  25. Black Mama White Mama
    Black Mama, White Mama became a key reference point for postmodern mash-up artists like Quentin Tarantino and Neveldine/Taylor, but the film’s socio-political jungle is not all fun-and-grindhouse games.
  26. The Poseidon Adventure
    A nightmarishly schematic fantasia of guiltless discomfort.
  27. Trafic
    If Playtime’s enormous scope was visionary, here Tati’s tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher.
  28. Asylum
    Asylum tries telling similar tales (twice) and comes up pathetically short in the scare department, but the atmosphere and theatrics of the Amicus presentation make it a more than worthwhile trip down memory lane for die-hard horror buffs.
  29. Lady Sings the Blues
    It’s an amateur star performance-as-Stanislavski mail order catalog: a powerhouse of Method-ology (born more from a lack of acting experience than pop singers’ already refined sense of emotive abandon), complete with ingénue tics, a self-conscious display of age range, tentative ad-libs, flailing limbs, leaky eyes, precariously receding eyelids.
  30. Night of the Lepus
    William F. Claxton’s film is a radically dull riff on the nature-run-amok genre, utilizing what must’ve felt at the time like the only animal not yet exploited to scare audiences. But scares are exactly what the filmmakers didn’t get.
  31. The Last House on the Left
    It’s the ultimate Vietnam allegory, except there’s no room for peace here, just war.
  32. Deliverance
    Dickey taps into that stark mortal terror of abandoning control, where to become a wild man is somehow a form of connection.
  33. Late Spring (1949)
    Few films have expressed, with as much force and lyricism as Ozu’s Late Spring, the various emotions (melancholy, bittersweet joy, impassioned regret, taciturn resignation) associated with the ongoing, perpetual dissolution of “the world as we know it.”
  34. Le Samouraï
    Melville’s 1967 masterpiece, which—through assuming the same systematic attention to detail as its iconically cool protagonist—achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty and grace.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Frenzy
    With a very strong cast and sharp dialogue by Anthony Shaffer, Frenzy is easily the strongest of the master’s final works.
  36. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things
    Made on the cheap and inspired by early Romero, this zombie flick doesn’t even have the dead rise until the final half-hour. Until then, we’re stuck with an amateur theater troupe chattering away as they venture out to an abandoned island for a goofy séance.
    • 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.
  38. Buck and the Preacher
    For all of Buck and the Preacher’s serious attempts to function as a revisionist western by centering Blacks in the narrative and examining the critical role they played on the frontier, it’s also a wildly entertaining film.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    In this exquisite merging of specific and universal, infinite and infinitesimal, Tokyo Story perhaps most clearly illuminates that Ozu is not the most Japanese of filmmakers, but the most human.
  40. Silent Running
    While the drones are still cuter than Ewoks, Lowell remains a cloying representation of a ‘70s acid freak shoving his save-the-trees mantra down your throat.
  41. There's Always Vanilla
    Unfortunately, the haphazard, showy cross-cutting between Laine’s to-the-camera narration and the flashbacks (sometimes to scenes he couldn’t possibly recollect) do little to hide the fact that Romero, like his aimless protagonist, seemingly couldn’t care less.
  42. Straw Dogs
    Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.
  43. A Clockwork Orange
    If you watch Clockwork Orange and see that this is the game Kubrick is playing with us, giving us an avenue into understanding a corrosion of society, the film may be appreciated as his finest masterwork in a career full of them. Certainly, it’s his most human film, right next to Lolita in its refusal to judge its central character’s sickness.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harold and Maude
    The effortless depiction of their growing camaraderie and unconscious courtship is one of Harold and Maude‘s great charms, as Ashby and screenwriter Colin Higgins transpose fading ideology into boundless truth across a modest framework of pitch-black exposition and glowingly pastoral aesthetic touches.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Last Picture Show
    Delineates the quiet, desperate lives of the citizens of Anarene, Texas over the course of one year in the early 1950s.
  46. Daughters of Darkness
    Kümel’s impulse to remain on the waning edge of eroticism turns what could’ve been another cheap thrill into a genuinely unsettling examination of the human race’s most happily sanctioned form of vampirism: man-woman couplings.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    An electrifying achievement, drawing its high-voltage forward momentum from the collision of semi-documentary procedural, with its based-on-real-events verisimilitude, and downbeat rogue-cop revisionism.
  48. Black God, White Devil
    By depicting revolutionary fiascos in a critical yet sympathetic light, Glauber Rocha calls on us to imagine what we’d want a revolution to look like, rather than having it spoon-fed to us by those claiming to represent a power beyond ourselves.
  49. Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    Remembered mainly as the neophyte Pacino’s launching pad into Godfather stardom, the modestly scaled, harrowing Panic in Needle Park has over the decades proven to be nearly as influential as Coppola’s blockbuster, setting a cinematic template later used by Drugstore Cowboy, Requiem for a Dream, and a good deal of Sundance Channel fodder.
  51. Two-Lane Blacktop
    America exploded in the ’60s; Two-Lane Blacktop is the post-apocalyptic road trip.
  52. Walkabout
    Roeg shoots every figure in the film like an instructional visual subject, and it levels the philosophical playing field—whether man, or ant, or echidna, or gnarled tree stump, they’re all fodder for the experimental interplay of light, shadow, and space.
  53. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
    There is, of course, Gene Wilder as Wonka, the reason most people think they like this movie, and he’s a wonderful actor quite capable of hitting Dahl’s ambivalences (and he has a lovely entrance), but Stuart’s clunky stop-and-start pace and sketchy tone give him nowhere to go.
  54. Klute
    Pakula’s seminal detective thriller, which is truly a piercing examination of loneliness.
  55. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    It could be the most authentic representation of wilderness life ever put on screen.
  56. Le Mans
    Le Mans needs to be rediscovered so that it can be hopefully embraced as one of star Steve McQueen’s finest hours.
  57. The Cat o' Nine Tails
    Structurally and thematically, Dario Argento’s The Cat O’ Nine Tails is an improvement over The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, even if the film’s non-linear convolutions of plot may purposefully distract. Set against a backdrop of genetic research and espionage, Argento’s formal obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness is on fierce display.
  58. 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.
  59. The Aristocats
    If there isn’t a single element in the entire film that’s not derivative of the studio’s then-recent past, you can’t blame them for sticking with what worked best—business models-cum-creative habits conditioned by horsewhip die hard, if at all.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Brewster McCloud
    What saves the film from curdled, wise-ass whimsy is the control Altman brings to the freewheeling material, to say nothing of the undercurrent of despair that keeps its absurdism bold and beguiling.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Topo
    Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo remains an enduring cult-film experience.
  62. Husbands
    One of Cassavetes’s greatest and most daring films.
  63. 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.
  64. Five Easy Pieces
    Bob Rafelson directs in an exploratory manner that naturally syncs up with Nicholson’s intuitive performance, his formalism suggesting a fusion of vérité and expressionism.
  65. La Piscine
    La Piscine is, more than anything else, a work of vivid sensory delights.
  66. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    While Roger Ebert’s screenplay contains overt jabs at Hollywood’s culture of exploitation, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cannot be called anything but sincere regarding its penchant for buxom female anatomy.
  67. Watermelon Man
    Gradually, Van Peebles turns stereotypical images of postwar bourgeois prosperity against themselves, leading to a denouement that feels oddly empowering in its total alienation from the status quo.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    With so many brilliant collaborators and points of view, whose movie—whose dream—is it anyway? Ashby seems to say it’s all of ours.
  69. A Man Called Horse
    Touted at the time of its release as a comparatively enlightened western, A Man Called Horse now looks like well-researched sensationalism—and is, admittedly, all the better for it.
  70. Mandabi
    Through it all Sembène maintains a steady, humanist touch.
  71. The Boys in the Band
    The sizzle of the bon mot-tossing ensemble, intact from the stage original, is bracing and fuels the film’s momentum, along with Crowley’s lacerating dialogue.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
    Right from its stylish and violently kinetic opening, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed establishes itself as one of the finest of the seven entries in Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle.
  73. The Honeymoon Killers
    The Honeymoon Killers is an intense, terrifying portrait of repression and instability.
  74. Hello, Dolly!
    The choreography, the performances, the set decoration, the dialogue, everything about Hello, Dolly! is played directly to the back row of the theater, which would be fine on the stage, but on anamorphic widescreen close-ups tends to be more frightening than mirthful.
  75. Z
    Forty years on, it’s still an eye-catching, fast-paced watch, but the plaudits it won as an uncompromising thriller and landmark cinema seem as shaky as the film’s villainous military officers’ insistence that its central murder was an accident.
  76. Duet for Cannibals
    Susan Sontag’s debut film serves as an intriguing cinematic extension of her more well-known written work.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Downhill Racer
    In scenes such as the anti-hero’s visit to his resentful father (“World’s full of them,” the old man snaps of his son’s desire to become a champion), Downhill Racer stands as lean condemnation of the calculating underdog clichés Rocky would bring make the norm.
  78. The Sterile Cuckoo
    Alan J. Pakula’s directorial debut takes a done-to-death story template and revitalizes it with intelligence, maturity, and tenderness.
  79. The Italian Job
    The Italian Job isn’t the first movie to take car chases into strange and new environments, but it sure is creative.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Medium Cool
    Medium Cool stages, not so much with voguish nihilism, despite its demonstrably downbeat ending, as dispassionate vérité straightforwardness, the growing pains that strain a nation when the countercultural ideal of limitless possibility matures into something closer to political reality.
  81. Easy Rider
    This legendary tale of a motorcycle odyssey gone wrong remains timeless for its diagnosing of the early stages of a social ennui that has now fully bloomed.
  82. Salesman
    An immersive drama that bridges real-life details with the catharses of parables with expressionistic on-the-fly camerawork, a blend of the textural and the poetic that’s hallucinatory and profound.
  83. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
    Director Francis films the scenes that center around the vampire with yellow-brown gels around the frames’ edges, giving the impression that they too are from Dracula’s omniscient view. They give Dracula Has Risen From the Grave a musty, jaundiced sensuality (like finding Great Aunt Mildred’s mothball stank-ridden garter belt hidden in the back of her Victorian closet) that characterizes Hammer’s blending of gothic tradition with modern prurience.
  84. Black Girl (1966)
    Decolonization in Black Girl isn't only a myth, but also a myth that actually strengthens the consumerist caste systems.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Red Beard
    The best of Kurosawa’s films are a challenge to look into our greatest fears and at our most terrible afflictions, whether personal or systemic, without turning away. Arguably the best Kurosawa film, Red Beard does not turn away.
  86. Faces
    Cassavetes didn’t improvise, and Faces was scripted, but many of the film’s scenes still have the feel of conversations happening right in front of you, with all the imperfections and digressions and looseness of the everyday.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Barbarella
    A rambling, shaggy-dog structure as an excuse to flagrantly foreground softcore sexual hijinks tinged with a pungent whiff of social commentary.
  88. Night of the Living Dead
    A stark, eerie and unrelenting parable of dread. There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.
  89. The Queen
    A quaint portrait it’s not, and aside from the conditions of the rat-trap midtown hotel where the competing queens are put up in, it’s hardly fly-on-the-wall either. While it presents its subjects at arm’s length, The Queen consistently recognizes the constraints they face.
  90. Rosemary's Baby
    Rosemary’s Baby is one of horror cinema’s all-time slow burns, drawing viewers gradually into entertaining the possibility that the movie’s series of strange coincidences and accumulating sense of dread are only subjective representations of Rosemary’s unraveling mental state.
  91. The Party
    The comically rich visual tapestry of Blake Edwards’s The Party still endures.
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