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 6.4 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
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  1. The Wrong Man
    The sense of moral responsibility in Hitchcock’s films may have never felt more imperative and succinct.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Giant
    Sitting through it is like cramming a decade’s worth of daily television-watching into a single sitting.
  3. The Bad Seed
    The Bad Seed might not have the lurid veneer of Oedipal conflict that turned The Good Son into a supreme guilty pleasure, but it’s got more false-façade performances than you could ever hope for.
  4. The Killing
    One of the great devils of 1950s American cinema.
  5. Ikiru
    Ikiru wows for its complicated interrogation (and innovation) of subjective, cinematic experiences of time and memory, but lulls in its commemoration of a wealthy, privileged man who finally decides to care after it’s absolutely confirmed he has no time left to live.
  6. Richard III
    Donning a doozy of a puttied schnoz, a slightly exaggerated limp, and a boyish, midnight-black wig, Sir Laurence Olivier feels more at home in the eponymous role of his own adaptation of Richard III than he does in any of his other storied roles, holding and releasing the succulent prose with unerring confidence and clarity.
  7. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    This is the most disturbing spin on the invasion premise, because it still permits the simple, classical predator/parasite interpretation, but, at the same time, makes the infiltration total, because the snatchers don’t just take your body, your memories, your brains—they take you. All of you.
  8. The Burmese Harp
    Ichikawa Kon’s 1956 film The Burmese Harp is a tender almost-musical film about the horrors of war and the obliteration of identity.
  9. All That Heaven Allows
    The frothy May-September (well, closer to June-July) romance All That Heaven Allows is the fountain from which directors as disparate as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Todd Haynes, and John Waters have all drunk, marking it as the most influential of the 20-plus films Sirk directed during the 1950s.
  10. El
    Though set in Mexico and ripe with authentic details from daily life, Él is less a portrait of machismo gone awry than it is a brutal and absurd glimpse at one man’s runaway paranoia.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rebel Without a Cause
    Where the attitudes of "East of Eden" are hopelessly dated and broad, the poetic longing for connection in Rebel Without a Cause will always feel timeless.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    To Catch a Thief
    Hitchcock and screenwriter John Michael Hayes posited voyeuristic spectacle as the essence of cinema in Rear Window; in To Catch a Thief they validate their thesis with plenty of spectacle to be voyeuristic over.
  13. The Night of the Hunter
    Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance.
  14. Lady and the Tramp
    Befitting its middle-ish chronological position, it’s not surprising that the serviceably cute but mundane Lady—a turn-of-the-century ditty about two love struck dogs from opposite sides of the gated community—might be the most ignorable, least assertive production of their golden era.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    East of Eden
    Even viewers who acknowledge Kazan’s lack of visual imagination usually concede that nobody got better performances out of actors, but this last vestige of his reputation is in real need of examination.
  16. Blackboard Jungle
    Poitier’s acting is scalding hot. If The Blackboard Jungle is worth anything, it’s for bearing witness to a major star in the making.
  17. A Star Is Born
    Despite A Star Is Born’s musty jabs at movieland decadence in the wake of satires like Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful, it was the craft found in Cukor’s alternately splashy and shadowy mise-en-scène, and displayed by Mr. James Mason, that most greatly aided Mrs. Sid Luft.
  18. Brigadoon
    At least the dancing is good, and Vincente Minnelli’s restless camera gooses a plodding story into liveliness.
  19. Magnificent Obsession
    Magnificent Obsession was a decisive turning point for Douglas Sirk, kicking off a beloved string of loopy ’50s melodramatic masterpieces.
  20. The Caine Mutiny
    The Caine Mutiny is not distinctive filmmaking or storytelling, and its idea of ethical debate is relying on familiar archetypes and arguments. It sure is standard, though. It’s like the well-constructed house that’s not meant to be distinctive, but was made to endure.
  21. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    Tati biographer David Bellos called 1953’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday “Tati’s most perfect film,” and in many ways, it’s difficult to disagree with this sentiment in terms of tone and form.
  22. Dial M for Murder
    What tends to make even lesser Hitchcock films shine is his innate gift for directing performers, and this accounts for many of the pleasures of this ditty.
  23. Crime Wave
    A relentlessly unforced potboiler that gazes at noir through the looking glass.
  24. Creature from the Black Lagoon
    A much more antic, exploitative experience than the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Mummy/Dracula pictures it stands alongside, Creature from the Black Lagoon perfectly typifies the transition from older, more European horror styles into bloodthirsty schlock and ever-cheaper thrills.
  25. Hondo
    Hondo is a mash of the usual tropes, a whirlwind of Native American war paint, cavalry stripes, a sawdust-saloon poker game, a few fistfights, plenty of gunfire, and every moral equation coming to a satisfactory balance by the time the credits roll.
  26. The Band Wagon
    Only musical theater people will plug into this love-fest, breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. That’s entertainment?
  27. It Came from Outer Space
    Inspired by an outline by Ray Bradbury and modified for the screen by Harry Essex, It Came From Outer Space remains the granddaddy of the ’50s atomic-scare pictures.
  28. House of Wax
    It’s Price that gives House of Wax its characteristic balance of elegance and lurid theatricality.
  29. I Confess
    I Confess ultimately reveals itself to be one of Hitchcock’s most successful examinations of the tension between public image and private turmoil.
  30. Peter Pan
    Peter Pan, in retrospect, seems much more a footnote among the studio’s 1950s output.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Star
    A threadbare, bargain-basement Sunset Boulevard, The Star features Bette Davis as Margaret Elliot, a washed-up actress hellbent on continuing her movie career.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Limelight
    A beautiful, melancholy meditation on aging and inspiration, and a personal film that, on account of Chaplin’s own diminishing popularity and prospects stemming from accusations of supposed communist sympathies, exudes a very real weight in each of its rich, elegant images.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Quiet Man
    The Quiet Man remains one of the purest distillations of this charismatic filmmaker’s diverse artistic nature.
  34. The Tales of Hoffmann
    If The Tales of Hoffmann fails as an emotional journey, it is sensational as a music video.
  35. Singin' in the Rain
    Many things reinforce the enduring greatness of Singin’ in the Rain, but its most charming element is the filmmakers’ love for and dedication to the basic tenants of cinema as pure enchantment, and an open indulgence of all the bells and whistles that have been allowed it to grow into something bigger and (arguably) better over the decades.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The African Queen
    Bogart slyly draws upon his past performances here—men of weary-eyed cynicism and faded idealism—to give Charlie’s rudderless existence an extra-textual charge.
  37. Rashomon
    The film is still one of the most glorious testaments to the frustrations and exhilarations of chasing an unvarnished truth.
  38. Miracle in Milan
    This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    On Dangerous Ground
    The urban harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all film noir. Despite the violence and the steady intensity, a remarkably pure film.
  40. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Released in the midst of the Korean War and the prime of McCarthy, the film achieved a unique relevance for a “spaceman” movie by unambiguously advocating for peace and grounding its pulp story in social reality.
  41. Alice in Wonderland
    This lack of force-fed moralizing, coupled with its diffuse plot and hazily psychedelic imagery, makes it hardly surprising that the film’s revival came about when it developed a cult following.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Tall Target
    As in Reign of Terror, Anthony Mann fashions a noir mini-masterpiece out of incongruous period reconstruction.
  43. Strangers on a Train
    Strangers on a Train is also simply a great thriller, yet another illustration of Hitchcock’s awe-inspiring ability to convey more with a single image than most directors can with minutes upon minutes of belabored set pieces.
  44. Sunset Boulevard
    Sunset Boulevard posits that the business and process of making films can often turn writers and directors into soulless scavengers of narrative detritus, performers into howling husks of wasted talent.
  45. The Damned Don't Cry
    The Damned Don’t Cry is an efficient, fast moving exercise in melodrama, hardly memorable and at times putrefying in its reliance on hokum, cliché, and bullshit sentimentality.
  46. The Asphalt Jungle
    Blood and trauma make an irresistible mix in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.
  47. The Rules of the Game
    Low comedy walks hand and hand with tragedy and beauty throughout; the film is frothy one minute, nearly apocalyptic the next, and so you’re never fully allowed to gather your bearings.
  48. Cinderella
    Despite its prodigious charms, it has probably destroyed more lives than any other Disney film, forcing a specific, unrealistic romantic archetype that truly does only exist in fairy tales onto generations of impressionable children, who would grow up desperate, needy, and crushed.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sands of Iwo Jima
    Allan Dwan’s film is an intimate rendering of a monumental event, featuring John Wayne in one of his most emotionally complex roles.
  50. Young Man with a Horn
    The non-musical performances are shallow: Douglas is forceful but one-note, Day is as square and wholesome as a glass of milk, and Bacall purrs along in the same faux-bad girl performance she’s given for the past 60 years. But I suppose that’s fitting for a morality play this black and white, where wild jazz, liquor, and loose women cause the downfall of man.
  51. Gun Crazy
    Lewis, through sheer force of will, turns the script’s easy ways out into the essence of blunt, adolescent sexual flowering.
  52. They Live by Night
    Ray’s plaintive artistry lends this weepy noir a melancholic beauty.
  53. Under Capricorn
    Though Under Capricorn’s dark and twisty narrative eventually unearths everyone’s secrets, it’s the swooning camera that most fully taps into the class and sexual tensions that consume the characters.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Third Man
    Although he’s only on screen for a fraction of the film’s running time, Lime (Welles) stands out as one of the screen’s most chilling embodiments of the banality of evil, and a perfect stand-in for Third Man’s vision of moral breakdown in post-WWII Europe.
  55. White Heat
    White Heat’s ultimate message: love’s a bitch…even crypto-incestuous love.
  56. Neptune's Daughter
    As if trying to put quotation marks around its disposability, 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter uses a perpetually underwhelmed narrator to undercut its central love story, surrounded by polo antics and swimwear fashionistas.
  57. The Set-Up
    Robert Wise’s The Set-Up isn’t noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan’s boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic.
  58. Force of Evil
    Garfield’s likably unlikable protagonist provides Force of Evil with a semblance of cohesiveness, even if the film often feels like the product of dueling fetishes and pet symbols.
  59. The Snake Pit
    As Virginia grapples with her inner demons, as well as a memory loss that leaves her disoriented and unsure of who she can trust, The Snake Pit periodically transcends its archaic psychological trappings to become an empathic examination of a woman battling both the internal and external forces that seek to fully erase her sense of self.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Rope
    A crime for most, a privilege for some is how Rupert classifies murder, but Hitchcock's eye-am-a-camera technique in Rope is after more than Nazi-superman residue still lurking after WWII.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Red River
    It’s a seemingly antithetical approach which separates Hawks’s cinema from its contemporaries and, in the case of Red River, shifted the moral viability of the western genre all at once.
  62. The Paradine Case
    This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.
  63. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is as enduring a classic as has ever come out of Hollywood, and arguably among the greatest, but the film is admittedly not without its share of rough spots.
  64. Black Narcissus
    Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
  65. Nightmare Alley
    Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley viscerally understands the lurid appeal of carnivals and acts of illusion.
  66. Shoeshine
    Notwithstanding the veracity of the American-occupied urban locations he captures, De Sica doesn’t innovate or subvert expectations in the manner of the contemporaneous war trilogy of Roberto Rossellini, and his plotting with principal screenwriter Cesare Zavattini doesn’t rise above the level of a vivid potboiler with a mild bent for muckraking.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Odd Man Out
    Odd Man Out is indeed a character study wrapped in the guise of a sociopolitical thriller, and a work which accordingly plays better when accentuating the moral and personal complexities of the former through the aesthetic prism of the latter, shedding the weight of topical investment even as the shadows of its influence hang literally and figuratively on the film’s dramatic landscape.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It's a Wonderful Life
    Without overlooking It’s a Wonderful Life‘s lapses into populist bathos, it’s necessary to rescue the Frank Capra film from its status as an untouchable American “classic.”
  69. The Best Years of Our Lives
    If The Best Years of Our Lives emerges as a more contemporary-seeing film than almost anything else to which its ingredients could compare, it’s because of how it wrestles with the burden of patriotism. The nation’s problems are right there in plain sight, just as clear as cinematographer Gregg Toland’s typically precise deep-focus shots.
  70. Notorious
    Love is a dark, corroded obsession in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a black-velvet biocide brimming with notes of tabloid titillation, spy-versus-spy nonsense, and romance as rotten as a half-eaten Granny Smith left out in the summer sun.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Stranger
    As distinctively Wellesian as Citizen Kane, and packing nearly as many technical wonders.
  72. Mildred Pierce
    Though its craft is accomplished, the film never gets deep under one’s skin the way it ought to.
  73. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Few other British films from that period seem to mythologize the pre-war period of Churchill's youth and early career quite as potently as Colonel Blimp.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Picture of Dorian Gray isn’t awful, though it’s certainly an instance in which an outright debacle would have made a much more interesting film.
  75. The Body Snatcher
    Even if the narrative threads aren’t as tightly focused on exploring a complex theme as one might hope, The Body Snatcher nevertheless manages to still send chills, and predominately through Wise’s fleet direction and Karloff’s unflinching embodiment of a real-world monster.
  76. Meet Me in St. Louis
    Vincente Minnelli’s most acclaimed musical, Meet Me in St. Louis is a fresh breath of stale air, a tart ode to nostalgia.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    Visually drab and flabby around the edges. Its seamy tale of murder is not layered in any way; what you see (or, in Wilder’s case, hear) is what you get.
  78. Gaslight
    Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lifeboat
    Lifeboat is actually much more complicated than it first appears. Its emphasis on moral debates in dialogue can seem a little dry, but Hitchcock’s shifting sympathies guarantee our guilty involvement with the characters until he builds to a climax of intellectual and spiritual excitation.
  80. Saludos Amigos
    Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade’s worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney’s manifest destiny to rewrite children’s dreams in the corporation’s own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record.
  81. Casablanca
    The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shadow of a Doubt
    Hitch’s habit of taking us to the edge of the abyss and then returning us with a wink, so often resulting in unconvincing happy endings, here seals one of his most pitiless visions of a monstrous cosmos admitted only to be denied.
  83. Cat People
    This subtle, glancing trust in our ability to read the true story between the lines is pivotal to Cat People’s sense of being simultaneously vague and explicit, succinct yet freighted with baggage.
  84. Now, Voyager
    Now, Voyager is the stuff of young lovers and hare-brained idealists, and if it can feel pretty foolish at times, it’s unforgettable for how sincere and affectionate it is toward one particularly time-honored cliché: that only fools falls in love.
  85. Bambi
    While not nearly as emotionally impacting as some of Disney’s other classics, Bambi might be the most restrained and lyrical of the bunch, a poem to the simplicity and purity of natural life.
  86. To Be or Not to Be
    Many of the film’s pleasures, then, derive from watching these characters successfully use the tools of the stage (improvisation, sense memory, prosthetics) to successfully subvert the Nazis.
  87. Sullivan's Travels
    Preston Sturges jammed volumes of sociological concerns into a 90-minute satire with Sullivan’s Travels, Hollywood’s greatest comedy.
  88. Woman of the Year
    Woman of the Year certainly has its other auxiliary charms: beautifully textured lighting by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg; a luminous, if limited, performance by Fay Bainter as Tess’s motherly aunt; and some enchanting simulations of soft winter snowfall. But it’s hard not to feel berated, in a time that’s seeing the resurgence of a pernicious nationalism, by both the film’s anti-feminist slant and its insistent compulsion to put a box around Americanism.
  89. They Died with Their Boots On
    Even if historical erroneousness intermittently undermines the film’s outlandish attempts at lionization, They Died with Their Boots On endures as one of the finest Flynn-de Havilland collaborations, providing a grand stage for the duo’s playful, poignant rapport.
  90. Dumbo
    In its scant 64-minute running time, the big-top melodrama of Dumbo reduces me to a blubbering, mucus-drizzling wreck at least once with every viewing.
  91. How Green Was My Valley
    Maybe because How Green Was My Valley doesn’t delve as deeply into the heart of darkness as Ford did in his earlier The Grapes of Wrath, it remains one of his most curiously underrated films.
  92. Citizen Kane
    I still stare at it, amazed and entertained, but dwarfed by the very idea of attempting to untangle the crow’s nest that has formed through the film’s ever-expanding histories. And what continuously stupefies me is that time works no miracles on this particular film: Scenes remain familiar, but the narrative seems to shift every time I return to it.
  93. Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.
  94. The Philadelphia Story
    Add Hepburn’s persona, beautifully explored here in all its wonder, and Stewart’s likeability, and George Cukor’s sensible, subtle, and lovingly unrushed direction of a firecracker script…the result is a studio picture far deeper and richer than its whimsical surface style might lead you to believe.
  95. The Letter
    Like Frankenstein’s monster in the Universal horror classics, The Letter keeps its prize creature too long in the shadows. But a Davis movie cannot withstand scrutiny without her, and even a bad Davis movie where she’s hamming and mugging and even humiliating herself is more fun than practically no Bette at all.
  96. Fantasia
    It’s unquestionably among Disney’s masterpieces.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Foreign Correspondent
    Where the film separates itself from the director’s other early studio work and, indeed, many films of the period, is in its ambition and scope of its production. The aforementioned set pieces are not only memorable, they’re among the most impressively mounted action sequences to that point.
  98. They Drive by Night
    They Drive by Night never coalesces into a coherent whole, but as far as sturdy ’40s Hollywood melodramas go, it’s a pretty sweet two-for-one movie deal.
  99. Rebecca
    A key film in Alfred Hitchcock’s evolution as a master explorer of sexual neuroses.
  100. The Grapes of Wrath
    Too many films these days trivialize poverty as an ironically, tastelessly over-produced pageant to earn kudos. The Grapes of Wrath is flawed, but it captures that shiver of panic that grips anyone for whom the money for the next meal is unknown. The film remains a vital document of the perversion and torment of the fantasy most commonly known as the American Dream.
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