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. Pinocchio
    Pinocchio redeemed Disney from the parlor trickery of Snow White and suggested animated features could indeed dance without strings.
  2. His Girl Friday
    One of the greatest and most mercenary of all American comedies.
  3. The Shop Around the Corner
    The charm of the gimmick in Lubitsch’s take (directing a script by Samuel Raphaelson, who had collaborated with the German-born filmmaker on comedies and melodramas alike) is passed over quickly in favor of studying both its effects on those involved, as well as the dynamics of the workplace at large.
  4. Destry Rides Again
    Above all, Destry Rides Again is fun, with a variety of stars and character actors utilizing their charisma with an expert sense of ease and offhandedness.
  5. The Roaring Twenties
    Climaxing with a tableau that’s as iconic as it is melodramatic, The Roaring Twenties revels in a relativism that keeps its momentum fresh and elusive.
  6. Jamaica Inn
    Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn would have been better titled The Gangs of Jamaica Inn, since the film is thoroughly concerned with groupings, allegiances, and the ways class standing relates to moral obligation.
  7. The Wizard of Oz
    A true amalgam of creative forces individually pooling their studio-contract talents like a hive of bees.
  8. Only Angels Have Wings
    The other reason why Hawks's film can't be approached as a pure sociological interrogation is that it's, quite visibly, a Hollywood production with certain inescapable commitments to entertainment convention. This isn't to downgrade the movie, though, as there's a reason why Hawks and other Old Hollywood filmmakers have become so revered.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Love Affair
    Unlike many romantic comedies of the current age, life is decidedly not what you make of it in McCarey’s films; instead, it comes at you hard and cruel, and if you’re lucky you’ll find the right person with whom to weather the storm.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Stagecoach
    If this is the Old West of our dreams, it’s one that exists in an outsider’s limbo, away from society’s rules, alternating between the breathtaking breadth of the American landscape and the Germanically shadowy lighting of Ford’s claustrophobic interiors.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    In less skilled hands, the film’s slow start would be a problem. Thanks to thrilling visuals and an effortless performance by Redgrave, Lady Vanishes is a lively companion piece to Hitchcock’s other magnificent British-made hit, The 39 Steps, about an innocent man mistaken for a spy.
  12. Bringing Up Baby
    Bringing Up Baby has some delightfully comic sequences, for sure. But I’m less inclined to remember the dynamics of the gag than Grant and Hepburn’s timing.
  13. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.
  14. The Awful Truth
    The Awful Truth is a perfect farce, devoid of any fat, in which Lucy and Jerry’s fantasies and schemes topple after one another like figurative dominoes.
  15. A Star Is Born
    William Wellman’s 1937 version of this oft-told tale, of the rising starlet and the plummeting alcoholic has-been she refuses to cast aside, is usually regarded as the second-best of the lot, a few steps behind George Cukor’s 1954 remake, which has the unfair advantage of being one of the unimpeachable masterpieces of American film.
  16. My Man Godfrey
    La Cava’s supple but cutting romantic comedy is one of the finest works of class-conscious comedy in Hollywood history.
  17. Swing Time
    Swing Time has some of Astaire and Rogers’s mightiest set pieces, which are intertwined to reflect their characters’ evolving relationship.
  18. Show Boat
    A surprisingly nuanced, if at times woefully dated, attempt to depict the complexities of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified as the problem of the 20th century: the color line.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Desire
    When Dietrich sings the Friedrich Hollander/Leo Robin song “Awake In A Dream” to Cooper, her purring, off-key voice envelops us in a world of addictive movie fantasy, presided over by two very different masters locked in a tantalizing creative affair.
  20. Captain Blood
    Errol Flynn’s wicked, wicked charm helps keep this high seas adventure afloat.
  21. Mutiny on the Bounty
    For Lloyd, Thalberg, and the writers, the point of the film was to tell a compelling story and, like the Bounty’s inebriated physician creating various tall tales to explain his wooden leg, facts and meanings ultimately just got in their way of crafting a great entertainment.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    Every musical number works, and the mistaken-identity plot is pleasant enough, even if there’s too much emphatic dithering from the supporting players toward the end.
  23. The 39 Steps
    Like Rear Window later on, this charming, masterfully made British spy adventure from 1935 is a sigh of doubt, perhaps even a cry of anguish, disguised as a slick pop bauble.
  24. The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Produced in England in 1934, The Man Who Knew Too Much was perhaps the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s films to openly attempt the autonomously cinematic, aggressively syntactic perfection with which he would later become synonymous.
  25. It Happened One Night
    Even now, It Happened One Night carries the unmistakable tenor of a breakout hit, fueled by confidently zippy repartee and manic comic invention that almost none of the innumerable pretenders to the throne of romantic comedy can match.
  26. Freaks
    Today, hardcore fans have a way of trivializing the film’s moral significance, some calling it a mere “masterpiece of shock cinema.” This is to seriously underplay the film’s blistering humanity and the audacious aesthetic and philosophical lengths to which Browning goes to challenge the way we define beauty and abnormality.
  27. The Public Enemy
    There’s little denying the power of Cagney’s presence, from the first moment he’s on screen, he radiates such a brash Fenian cockiness you can imagine kids at the time flocking out of the theater and cocking their caps just like him. It’s a performance so perfect in its intensity that any other quibbles about the film ultimately recede into insignificance.
  28. The Front Page
    Milestone’s direction is only sporadically inspired.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    City Lights
    The first great peak in City Lights, the boxing scene, may be the most brilliant single comedy sequence of his career, not least because of the participation of Hank Mann, who plays the Tramp’s Bluto-like opponent in the ring, and Eddie Baker, who plays the referee.
  30. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Anti-war statements of the cinema in the subsequent 80 years have occasionally surpassed Lewis Milestone’s technically and artistically groundbreaking film, but few can match it for relentless despair or elemental fury—both on and off the battlefield.
  31. Blackmail
    While the film lacks the feverish, autocritical neuroses of Hitchcock’s mid- and late-period masterpieces, it often superbly plumbs notions of guilt and vulnerability, all the while cheekily satirizing Scotland Yard as a swayable arbiter of justice.
  32. Man with a Movie Camera
    The blatant staging and rich emotional undercurrent of Vertov’s documentary footage presage Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth mantra, and was a far cry from the utilitarian social-realist mandate that would soon drain Soviet cinema of this experimental edge.
  33. The Passion of Joan of Arc
    The Passion of Joan of Arc remains the moment that [Dreyer] guided his medium to new heights, and also crafted a work that would endure outside of any specific context.
  34. Wings
    Seen today, Wings impresses mostly with its enormous scale—its appearance of having been made with obscene amounts of money.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Circus
    It is Chaplin’s great elegy to the lost art of music-hall pantomime and, for that matter, the soon-to-be lost art of silent-film comedy.
  36. The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    A showcase for director Alfred Hitchcock’s intense study of the German Expressionist movement, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog boasts artfully animated intertitles, plunging shadows, and oppressive camera angles.
  37. Sunrise
    A horn of cinematic plenty continuously spills from Sunrise, not only in its production design and Murnau’s dreamlike images (rendered by a pair of American cinematographers in the German émigré’s first Hollywood film), but in an unswerving commitment to the varied tones of screenwriter Carl Mayer’s scenario.
  38. Battleship Potemkin
    A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.
  39. Intolerance
    Likely the most influential film ever made.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Seventh Continent (1989)
    By concentration exclusively on humanity’s negativism, Haneke proves to be as damagingly reductive of life’s possibilities as the emotional malaise he sets out to expose.
  41. Atarrabi & Mikelats
    A challenge inherent to a parable of this sort is that evil, being so seductive, can make good seem dull or prissy by comparison.
  42. When It Melts
    When It Melts is a film that lives and dies on the games that it plays with audiences.
  43. Dying
    The film’s diligent script and nuanced performances are such that the depressing material stops short of turning into a depressing experience.
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