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. Planet of the Apes
    Planet of the Apes became a blockbuster because it’s cannily crafted, in part, as a ripping adventure yarn, director Franklin Schaffner staging a long desert trek for survival by Taylor and his two surviving shipmates in the opening half-hour, a brilliant “hunt” sequence with gorillas pursuing the human brutes as targets and trophies (memorably enhanced by Jerry Goldsmith’s dissonant, percussive score), and a lengthy chase sequence where the escaped spaceman leaps and dodges past hairy denizens of church, museum, and marketplace.
  2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    The final passages are the most exultant in their taking us beyond ourselves into a wide-eyed state of untarnished possibilities; entirely without words, the film reminds us that, despite how far we’ve come, the real odyssey has only just begun.
  3. Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    This strange time capsule of late 1960s dementia more or less lives up to its oddball reputation—too unnerving to fall into the category of horror comedies but too cutesy to be labeled as a straight-up shocker a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In other words, it’s unclassifiable, which has amplified its cult appeal.
  4. The Graduate
    Director Mike Nichols exploits rather than interrogates Ben’s anxieties, so that his ennui is reducible to his accomplishments, which keep getting repeated by the adults as badges of vicarious honor. Nichols also plays Ben’s socially awkward tics for laughs, whether Ben’s literally whimpering in Mrs. Robinson’s presence or in a cold sweat as he arranges what appears to be his first sexual encounter.
  5. 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.
  6. Navajo Joe
    Navajo Joe plays more like a ’50s B western in its fluid pacing, compact narrative construction, and hokey emphasis on star power than it does the kinds of sprawling genre re-workings common to its era.
  7. Cool Hand Luke
    Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout, bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat, but the film’s efforts to sentimentally humanize him by psychological revelation are clumsy.
  8. Wait Until Dark
    When the lights go out at the end of the film, so did the lights in the movie theaters.Terence Young’s tense cinematic adaptation so ruthlessly tightens the screws of tension that one could be forgiven for not noticing an earthquake, much less dimmed house lights.
  9. Point Blank
    Though Point Blank is rife with existential malaise, it is also one of the most ferociously sexy crime movies ever made.
  10. Bonnie and Clyde
    Though Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Dorado
    Pangs of déjà vu might strike while watching El Dorado, as it’s a thinly-veiled remake of an earlier John Wayne film directed by Howard Hawks and co-written by Leigh Brackett for Warner Bros., 1959’s Rio Bravo. Though the stories are similar, El Dorado feels sharper, bolstered by Harold Rosson’s brilliant photography with scenes seemingly painted on celluloid.
  12. 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.
  13. Chimes at Midnight
    Welles is at the height of his powers while reveling in the poetic force of Falstaff’s weakness.
  14. Persona
    Despite its elaborate meta-game-playing, which has had a pronounced and unquantifiable influence on film culture, Persona remains intensely alive and intimate.
    • 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.
  16. Blow-Up
    Blow-Up is moving and influential for the chasms it understands to exist between people, and for its perception of art as unable to bridge those divides.
    • 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.
  18. Cul-de-sac
    Cul-de-Sac remains a searing reminder that Roman Polanski’s idiosyncratic grasp of the human mind was once evinced theatrically, rather than through narrative ferocity.
  19. Seconds
    A beautiful x-ray of middle-aged existential crisis, Seconds is arguably a second-tier John Frankenheimer funhouse of paranoia, but the same might be said of any film that isn’t The Manchurian Candidate.
  20. Au hasard Balthazar
    Au Hasard Balthazar possesses a strictly balanced, bemused-unto-neigh-indifferent attitude toward delineating between the wry and the glum, the sacred and the profane.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torn Curtain
    Torn Curtain, which was a commercial success because of the drawing power of its stars, is an artistic flop.
  22. The Endless Summer
    True to its title, The Endless Summer exudes a blissful, mellow buzz that could easily be misconstrued as lazy or innocuous filmmaking.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Naked Prey
    A purified chase film, Naked Prey nevertheless is at its most affecting in the childlike scenes between the main character and a young native girl (played by Bella Randles) he befriends along the way.
  24. Band of Outsiders
    More than lifting from and reconfiguring the artifacts of auteurist Hollywood, Band of Outsiders sees Godard parsing out his feelings for Karina, then his wife (they divorced soon after the film was completed), and meditating on the mercurial nature of his own preoccupations.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Ipcress File
    In the end, The Ipcress File abandons its more low-key, nuts-and-bolts depiction of spycraft, and as such morphs from the pure antithesis of a 007 romp into something far closer to a self-serious send-up.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Variety Lights
    With its tale of a peripatetic band of low-rent theater types, Variety Lights incorporates many, if not most, of Fellini’s signature themes.
  27. The Train
    The Train makes unmistakably clear to us that heroism isn’t always black and white—that sometimes it’s simply about doing what’s right even if you don’t understand why.
  28. The Americanization of Emily
    Though a bit overstuffed with long-winded speeches, Chayefsky’s scabrously funny script brims with snappy, crackling dialogue.
  29. Mary Poppins
    The “Whistle While You Work” residue of domestic slavery that colors “A Spoonful of Sugar” aside, Mary Poppins is basically Long Day’s Journey Into Matriarchy (cathartic for some, terrifying for others).
  30. A Hard Day's Night
    Even when the band plays away from private eyes or songs simply play over disconnected footage of them having fun, the strength of their songcraft is stirring.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harakiri
    Structured with intricacy and precision, the storyline alternates between present and past, using its extended flashback sequences to delay and then detonate narrative revelations like so many time bombs.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Marnie
    The film’s themes, along with its avalanche of formal signifiers, are all fused together in the magisterial hunting sequence.
  33. 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.
  34. Zulu
    A good platter for a great, underappreciated classic of British cinema (under the direction of American expatriate Cy Endfield)—light on supplements but strong in presentation.
  35. The Patsy
    The Patsy reflects a genuine affection for the artisans and jacks-of-all-trades that make careers like his possible.
  36. An Autumn Afternoon
    The progression of Ozu’s style seems to parallel that of Jacques Tati, who moved from the mutable likes of M. Hulot’s Holiday into the glass-cut inflexibility of Playtime.
  37. Black Sabbath
    Black Sabbath speaks to the vastness of Bava’s abilities in the realms of the terrifying and the supernatural.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    It’s Sirk-on-a-shoestring, and twice as cynical.
  39. Dead Ringer
    The film, meekly directed far across the soundstage by former actor Paul Henreid, is a potboiler filled with oh-so-convenient plot twists and purely incidental characterizations.
  40. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    Dr. Strangelove is unique as an American studio film in that nearly every scene addresses its alignment of military action with sexual impotence and bodily excretion. It’s possibly the filthiest studio comedy ever made, even though there isn’t a single gross-out gag, curse word, or graphic image in its entire running time.
  41. America America
    Filmed with a cast of largely nonprofessional actors, America America immediately strives to impress its audience with the raw reality of its immigrant narrative.
  42. 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.
  43. High and Low
    High and Low is a masterful cinematic elevator connecting two warring social perspectives, finding a common ground between them in the pressurized corners of the classic crime drama.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
    For a three-hour, epoch-ending epic made by a comedy neophyte, it yields a treasure of showbiz lore.
  45. Lord of the Flies
    Brook renders savagery with the despairing eye of a humanist, and with the irresolvable ambivalence of an artist.
  46. Dementia 13
    Dementia 13 has always been a chilling and confident horror mixtape, fashioned by a man who was a few years away from consecutively producing four of the most famous of all American movies.
  47. The Great Escape
    The Great Escape is that rare war film that doesn’t fully indulge in assumed nationalism, save for the fact that everyone speaks English. Sturges never touches on the essential hollowness and cruel pageantry of war, but he does the next best thing by depicting an international effort where victory, no matter how short-lived, depends on the cooperation of myriad talents, rather than the gruff can-do attitude of an unbreakable chosen one.
  48. 8½
    8½ works best as a self-deprecating comedy, a fact revealed most forcefully in the folly of film production on display.
  49. Cleopatra
    Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat.
  50. Irma la Douce
    If not exactly an endearing experience on the whole, Irma la Douce is a fine example of Billy Wilder’s mid-career eccentricity and cosmopolitan curiosity.
  51. Hud
    Remarkably dull Hud more or less plays out as a home-on-the-range knock-off of Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Rebel Without a Cause.
  52. 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Young Racers
    The Young Racers mostly succumbs to the streak of pretension strongly felt beneath the hubristic surfaces of more than a few Corman features.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    That undeniable off-screen friction only helps grease the wheels of the film’s compulsive forward momentum, supplying a crackling energy to scenes wherein, among other gothic horrors, pet birds are served up for supper with relish.
  55. Cléo from 5 to 7
    Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early-’60s Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard’s Breathless.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    It represents some of the first and most essential steps into a new age of filmmaking.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Experiment in Terror
    Credit the film’s modest virtues to Edwards’s undeniable verve as a visual stylist. Still, with a running time slightly over two hours, Experiment in Terror is a bit too protracted to count as an unqualified success.
  58. Good Morning
    This profound film reveals that nothing is below the purview of existential contemplation, even all matters of flatulence, and words as simple as “Good morning” are revealed to contain fathomless multitudes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Cid
    There’s no denying El Cid‘s lucid grandeur as it reaches its famous climax, a simultaneously triumphant and tragic portrait of the warrior as corpse that, like the best of Mann’s work, never neglects the human toll of heroism.
  60. Splendor in the Grass
    Inge’s scenario unravels alarmingly once the two would-be lovers start to drift apart thanks to Deanie’s nervous breakdown and the simultaneous (almost psychically connected) market crash of 1929, but the first half of the film is a tour de force of deferred urges, contortion acts of awkward intimacy, and the thrill of adolescence.
  61. Breakfast at Tiffany's
    Blake Edwards’s discontent-but-charmed portrait of a long-lost New York state of blithe is, like most Blake Edwards films, narratively scattershot but reliably fixated on the cinematic chemistry of social relations in a mod (and post-mod) era, which invariably boil down to genders and the extent to which individuals ascribe to their assigned sex roles.
    • 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.
  63. Yojimbo
    Something of a textbook example of the perfect crowd-pleaser, Kurosawa’s tale is sociopolitical wish fulfillment via archetypal samurai drama, albeit with a twist or three.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Guns of Navarone
    Gregory Peck, as Mallory, gives a wonderfully unperturbed performance, outdone only by the versatile coldness and comedy of Anthony Quinn. David Niven is the subservient but stylish chemist Miller, rounding out a film that ranks among the best war movies—for mayhem, fighting and a simple, sanctimonious story about heroism when it’s war at all costs.
  65. Blast of Silence
    Haunting, remote, and workmanlike, Blast of Silence may be the only film I’ve ever seen with a trip on the Station Island Ferry in which I expected a tumbleweed to flit across the deck.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Breathless
    What remains most striking, and most moving, about Godard’s first feature is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism.
  67. The Misfits
    A perplexing misfire more than a complete dud, The Misfits‘s true legacy remains in the personal histories of those involved with the production rather than in the far more exceptional careers of the artists who brought it to its dull fruition.
  68. 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Seven
    The Magnificent Seven fights an uphill battle in matching the scope and thrills of its source material.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    Kurosawa most often did his finest work when combining his idiosyncratic and popular sensibilities into humane, broadly accessible entertainments; it just so happens that The Hidden Fortress remains more unabashedly entertaining than most.
  71. Psycho
    Felt in the full impact of a theatrical screening (with the pleasure of seeing patrons reflexively kick or stiffen at the sight of Miles startled by her mirrored reflection), its power is not just that of a showman’s calibrated scare machine, but of a somber fugue on the trapped 20th-century creatures who inhabit its world, clawing but never budging an inch.
  72. The Bellboy
    The Bellboy clearly sets a standard of self-involvement and examination in Lewis’s work that is so successfully hermetic that it scarcely needs the approval of the audience.
  73. Bells Are Ringing
    It has the unfortunate effect of being a movie that seems stuck on a Broadway stage.
  74. The Apartment
    The tone of The Apartment differs from both those darkly moral movies and the filmmaker’s farces, finding a middle ground of somber tragedy that undercuts the awkward comedy of manners between the characters.
  75. Private Property
    Private Property abounds in inventive low-budget filmmaking while stress-testing a pulpy, dime-store premise.
  76. The Cranes Are Flying
    One of the greatest films of the Soviet era.
  77. The Mummy
    The Mummy is one of Hammer’s classics, cleverly fusing the human pathos of the original Universal film with the creature-centric physicality of the sequels the latter inevitably yielded.
  78. Shadows
    At 80 minutes, its cinematic flash fiction, and a suitable entry point into the lively body of work Cassavetes made.
  79. The Magician
    This piquant control over cinematic grammar doesn’t quite rescue the film from a laughably zombie-tinged climax and an anomalous deus ex machina denouement, but it makes The Magician one of Bergman’s more accessible failures, and collapses any suspicious connection between him and the fretful Vogler.
  80. North by Northwest
    The picture is hugely pleased with itself, but it’s too funny and expertly calibrated to mind in the least. Both Hitchcock and Grant raise relaxed confidence to masterpiece level here.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Plan 9 from Outer Space
    Plan 9 stands as a testament to sincerity run amok, and as a passionate display of artistic limitations, it’s as glorious as it is flabbergasting.
  82. Anatomy of a Murder
    Preminger had the confidence in his performers and faith in his intelligent viewers: a happy combination.
  83. Wild Strawberries
    Initially, Wild Strawberries appears to be an almost pointedly unsubtle coming-of-age story that’s been goosed with dime-store surrealism and male handwringing masked as intellectual engagement with humankind. But the bluntness is a misdirection that underlines the depth of Bergman’s empathy with his hero as well as his dedication to his real subject, which is the process of mentally freeing oneself from an insidiously limiting self-mythology.
  84. Some Like It Hot
    Magnificently paced and terrifically funny at nearly every turn, Some Like It Hot was imbued with an inherent distrust of capitalism and big business that Wilder regularly expressed in an only slightly covert manner.
  85. Imitation of Life
    The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.
  86. Sleeping Beauty
    Just as the film’s gorgeous backdrops suggest characters trapped in suspended animation, the many colorful balls of light that frequently circle their heads hauntingly convey the filmmakers’ idea of fate and love locked in a cosmic struggle.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Uncle
    Mon Oncle is not Jacques Tati’s most ambitious film, nor his most democratic. It is quite possibly, however, his most didactic and depressing.
  88. The Seventh Seal
    The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.
  89. The Big Country
    Although The Best Years of Our Lives remains Wyler’s most essential assessment of the American psyche, The Big Country is stunning for how it meshes the intimate strife of a particularly white American stripe of self-resentment with the epic vista of Technirama Technicolor.
  90. The Blob
    The heroes may be teenagers, but The Blob, though generally a goofy and enjoyable B-programmer ideal for watching while loaded in the middle of the night, is still one of the most pointedly reactionary of the 1950s’ alien-invasion movies.
  91. Vertigo
    Alfred Hitchcock’s rich and strange masterwork.
  92. Thunder Road
    The ubiquitously involved star’s charisma can’t completely overshadow a sluggish plot... Nonetheless, its hard-charging chase sequences make it a vintage Dukes of Hazzard-flavored noir.
    • Slant Magazine
  93. The Tarnished Angels
    Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Paths of Glory
    Paths of Glory may be first-rate humanity, but it’s also second-rate art.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bridge on the River Kwai
    Whereas Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago feel more pictorial than cinematic, The Bridge on the River Kwai carefully builds its psychological tension until it erupts in a blinding flash of sulfur and flame.
  96. Peyton Place
    This was hot stuff in the mid-’50s, but beneath the sleazy coating covering the film (camp aficionados take note) is an unabashed and moderately retrograde plea for community openness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    3:10 to Yuma
    The offhand wryness of Elmore Leonard’s original story is nicely captured in Halsted Welles’s adaptation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    An Affair to Remember
    A remake by Leo McCarey of his own 1939 classic Love Affair, the film progresses as a graceful switch from romantic comedy to weepie melodrama, reflecting the director’s deep-rooted belief in the intricate bond between laughter and tears.
  99. A Face in the Crowd
    Strong performances and a fiery aggressive tone keep things moving, but A Face in the Crowd is dated and not particularly deep.
  100. 12 Angry Men
    What's most interesting about the intense deliberations that ensue, specifically when a piece of seemingly indisputable evidence is brought back into question, is how a fresh angle and perspective, usually born from Juror 8's critical thinking, can permanently alter the tone of the discussion.
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