Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. The Old Town Girls
    The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.
  2. Iron Butterflies
    Roman Liubyi’s documentary is nothing if not self-consciously obsessed with its own making.
  3. When It Melts
    When It Melts is a film that lives and dies on the games that it plays with audiences.
  4. Hunt Her, Kill Her
    Hunt Her, Kill Her simply isn’t tight enough to maintain the tension that it seeks to create.
  5. #Manhole
    Kumakiri Kazuyoshi counters the comic absurdity with a genuinely discomfiting sense of the manhole’s atmosphere, and threads of intrigue that are already mostly spun by the time you see them.
  6. The Plough
    The sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, only makes a few appearances throughout the film.
  7. in water
    Connoisseurs of Hong Sang-soo’s cinema will no doubt be fascinated by the transcendent minimalism of the film, which suggests Picasso knocking off a sketch on a piece of paper in a matter of seconds.
  8. Arnold Is a Model Student
    Even at its most confrontational, the film maintains a carefully controlled deadpan tone.
  9. Passion
    Passion already finds Hamaguchi Ryûsuke to be a superb orchestrator of moods and tones.
  10. Matter Out of Place
    Consisting largely of long takes sans music or commentary, the film uncovers the paradox that trash, so apparently devoid of meaning or use-value, needs little commentary.
  11. The Oak
    The film’s naïve utopianism is infectious, demanding that we live as though life were worth it in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
  12. White Balls on Walls
    Sarah Vos creates a nearly mockumentary effect that neither fully lampoons nor endorses contemporary standards for the art world’s political correctness but lands at a decidedly more ambivalent point.
  13. The Gullspång Miracle
    The film is a philosophical account of the shaky ground that human existence stands on.
  14. Happer's Comet
    Whereas films like Halloween and Blue Velvet expose the violence and perversion that underlies the manicured artifice of so many suburban environs, Happer’s Comet, by means of a simple temporal displacement, gestures above all at their arbitrariness.
  15. Minamata Mandala
    The film understands how atrocity is perpetuated, fanning a maddening sense of injustice.
  16. Once Within a Time
    The film proposes that, in the search for viable alternatives to techno-fascism and climate apocalypse, we might look to the margins of our world, to unfulfilled experiments (including those of cinema) and cultures supposedly left behind by history.
  17. I Heard It Through the Grapevine
    Dick Fontaine and Pat Harley’s documentary makes the political personal at every turn.
  18. Realm of Satan
    The film isn’t designed to challenge what you think you know about the Church of Satan.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Invisible Fight
    Writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s deliriously weird The Invisible Fight would be irksome if it weren’t crafted so lovingly and with a charming earnestness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Arcadia
    Yorgos Zois’s film banks on juxtaposition alone without quite delving into more fertile terrain.
  21. Langue Étrangère
    The film finds its profundity in moments where not much is said and nothing is intellectualized, when language is stripped to its bare bones.
  22. West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty
    Med Hondo’s is a bravura spectacle of intellectual and cinematic daring.
  23. Egoist
    Though Egoist can sometimes feel overly tidy, there’s something refreshing about its straightforward approach. Consistent with its style, which is so free of ornament, it pursues its themes with a welcome directness.
  24. Samsara
    The film exemplifies Lois Patiño’s ongoing efforts to complicate docufiction approaches with otherworldly reveries meant to communicate states beyond our immediate reality.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    July Rhapsody (2002)
    Ann Hui’s investment in her characters and their passions bleeds through every frame.
  26. No Fear, No Die
    As with Claire Denis’s previous Chocolat, emphasis is placed both on how the French legacy of colonialism persists into the present, as well as how Black men are often filtered through the white imagination to ruinous ends.
  27. Happy Campers
    Amy Nicholson’s empathy for her subjects is undeniable.
  28. Plastic
    Even a banal life can have a musicality and life to it, but once it leaves high school, Plastic’s portrait of adult life comes off as a monotone drone.
  29. The Virgin of the Quarry Lake
    Laura Casabé abstracts the typical emotions of tortured teens, only to then amplify them.
  30. Notes on Displacement
    It presents all the complex and seemingly contradictory emotions of a forced life on the road.
  31. McVeigh
    McVeigh’s ominous atmosphere is omnipresent, clinging to Timothy like a dog to a bone.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Klezmer Project
    As with a traditional documentary, The Klezmer Project is affected by forces outside the filmmakers’ control.
  33. You Burn Me
    Matías Piñeiro’s film is an intimate, impressionistic meditation on love and desire, death and memory, silence and expression.
  34. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Ed Harris and Jessica Lange electrifyingly bring so many of their characters’ emotions to the surface, even as they convey that James and Mary are burying so much more beneath it.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Henry Fonda for President
    If Fonda was an avatar of American liberalism’s tolerance and self-scrutiny, the film suggests, so, too, does he represent its complicity in the nation’s sins and its failure to change its course in the direction of justice.
  36. Direct Action
    We sorely need documentaries like Direct Action that can show not only the real leverage that militant mass movements can exert, but how that power can be redirected from protest to the building of autonomous communities and back again.
  37. Little, Big, and Far
    The film adopts a diaristic, epistolary form that flattens its emotional topography.
  38. Collective Monologue
    The film reveals—and urges on—a historical shift in how we relate to other living beings.
  39. A Samurai in Time
    A Samurai in Time isn’t just having fun with fake swords and chonmage wigs, as it also provides a lot of gentle reflections about history, modernity, and our place in it all.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Where to Land
    Where to Land opts for quiet moments of connection, raising questions rather than giving definitive answers.
  41. Trains
    The film's chronological rigor imparts an "on-rails" historical linearity, a sensation of inexorable progress and doom.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Gavagai
    The film is a complex treatise on hierarchies of race, gender, and power in the contemporary art world.
  43. Queen at Sea
    As much as Binoche is the backbone of Queen at Sea, Courtenay and Calder-Marshall’s raw performances are no less impressive.
  44. To Hold a Mountain
    The documentary ultimately reveals itself as a paean to female strength and resistance.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    My Wife Cries
    The film starts off as an ostensibly simple tale of infidelity before it begins to grapple with even more anxious themes as it shuffles its characters into a series of memorable tableaux.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dao
    As it bounces around from conversation to conversation to paint a portrait of a community at once both fractured and reassembled thanks to these congregations, Dao comes to suggest a less sardonic version of one of Robert Altman’s hangout movies.
  47. Mouse
    This is subject matter that might sound heavy, but the difficult feelings dredged up never overwhelm the film’s gentle, character-driven approach.
  48. Wolfram
    While Wolfram might struggle to convey a depth of feeling for its characters and the brutal, dehumanizing frontier they call home, it can be an intermittently satisfying good-versus-evil period piece.
  49. In a Whisper
    Leyla Bouzid’s ability to capture the complexities and contradictions of familial affection is what makes In a Whisper so impressive.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Nightborn
    Even if the film has few surprises in store for us, there’s something pleasingly unpretentious about how it leaves little room for subtext throughout.
  51. Lumiere, Le Cinema!
    Thierry Frémaux’s tribute is at its best when it spotlights just how much can still be rediscovered in the Lumière brothers’ formidable filmography, over 130 years after they filmed workers leaving the factory.
  52. Manas
    With one foot planted in documentary exposé and the other in coming-of-age drama, the film falls short of satisfying the demands of either genre.
  53. The Diary of a Chambermaid
    The influence of Brecht and Godard is plain to see, but any distancing effect is counterbalanced by Radu Jude’s earthy black humor and especially by the main character, who gives the film its strong emotional core.
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