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 6.3 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. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.
  2. Bitter Moon
    As easy as it would be to make rude connections between the film’s raunchy shenanigans and Polanski’s own history, the fact is that Bitter Moon doesn’t feel like either an explanation, an apology, nor a defense of the kinky sexual games adults play. Think of it as Polanski’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
    • 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.
  4. In the Same Breath
    In Wang Nanfu’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.
  5. El Planeta
    Amalia Ulman’s film is a bittersweet comedy of human behavior observed with a relaxed yet intently focused eye.
  6. Lost Course
    What distinguishes the film from ordinary journalism, and what constitutes its intervention in reality, is a difference in timescale.
  7. I'm Your Man
    The film’s disarming romcom sensibilities are an unlikely yet fitting vehicle for timely ruminations on AI.
  8. Introduction
    The film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.
  9. Petite Maman
    The film evinces Céline Sciamma’s profound knack for visual economy, communicating much with silent looks and structured absences.
  10. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling.
  11. Fabian: Going to the Dogs
    Its characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream, the dread before an immense catastrophe that’s unavoidable because it’s already happened.
  12. White Hunter Black Heart
    White Hunter, Black Heart finds Eastwood reaching a peak in the fields of both film direction and acting.
  13. Friends and Strangers
    The film’s tonal and situational shapeshifting doesn’t go to the surrealist lengths of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but James Vaughan similarly indulges in burlesquing upper-middle-class complacency.
  14. All Light, Everywhere
    Theo Anthony’s film is a playful, enraging, free-associative cine-essay that both expands and eats itself alive as it proceeds.
  15. Red Rocket
    Sean Baker is dedicated at the same time to the material realities of being poor in the United States and to the irreverent artificiality of snap zooms, smash cuts, and unexpected music cues.
  16. The Velvet Underground
    Todd Haynes’s documentary excitingly captures an era’s explosion of creativity, one that bespoke new and challenging kinds of freedom.
  17. The Worst Person in the World
    The film may be the prime example of how to restore fun, significance, and even a little bit of sex to the well-worn terrain of the romantic comedy.
  18. Petrov's Flu
    Kirill Serebrennikov’s blackly comedic fantasia paints a none-too-rosy picture of Russia, or its Soviet past festering just beneath the surface.
  19. Ali & Ava
    Ali & Ava once again showcases Clio Barnard’s uncanny ability to capture the insoluble complexities of life.
  20. In Front of Your Face
    The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.
  21. Parallel Mothers
    The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Pedro Almodóvar understands to be one in the same.
  22. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    Mitchum doesn’t remotely overshadow the film’s first-rate ensemble of character actors.
  23. The Rescue
    Aside from being a thrilling account of a hair-raising rescue, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary attests to living a calling.
  24. Dug Dug
    The film is marked by an empathetic understanding of the inkling of belief that can be exhumed from even the most rational of minds.
  25. Benediction
    Terence Davies’s film is a rhapsodic portrayal of an upper-crust milieu in which words are wielded like weapons by people who might otherwise be pariahs.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Arrebato (1979)
    Arrebato is an arresting feat of self-aware filmmaking, lashing together experimental tendencies with the tropes and trappings of genre cinema.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Dead & Buried
    With eerie atmosphere to spare, and an emphasis on communal terrors and long-buried secrets, this surprisingly wistful film hews closer to folk horror, suggesting Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man by way of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil.
  29. Great Freedom
    In Great Freedom, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is.
  30. Dune: Part Two
    Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.
  31. Nightmare Alley
    Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley viscerally understands the lurid appeal of carnivals and acts of illusion.
  32. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The film works magic by embracing excess, finding a kind of harmony and possibility within it, and reminding us of the beauty and lunacy of the human experience along the way.
  33. Kimi
    The film extend into impactful hyperbole the tensions inherent in the situation of being subjects of and subjects to incessant surveillance.
  34. 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.
  35. Sansho the Bailiff
    There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.
  36. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    The film is marked by wild flashes of invention, all born of painstaking craft and devotion.
  37. Coma
    A heady rush of ideas, the film’s avant-garde mélange of live-action footage, abstract video art, and multiple kinds of animation just barely masks that it’s a rather simple story about a Zoomer’s inner struggle with both her own mortality and that of the world.
  38. Both Sides of the Blade
    The studied ambiguity of what’s going on in Fire doesn’t keep it from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller.
  39. Rimini
    The film fleshes out the perhaps familiar characterizations at its center by tying contemporary wounds to the persistent presence of Europe’s ugly history.
  40. The Novelist's Film
    The film proves that Hong Sang-soo has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details.
  41. Robe of Gems
    A Bolañesque waking nightmare, the film insists that we come to terms with it rather than straightforwardly enjoy it.
  42. This Much I Know to Be True
    The accumulating effect of this airy and resonant film’s formal devices is that of a heartbroken artist learning to reengage with society.
  43. 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.
  44. Babi Yar. Context
    Sergei Loznitsa continues to mine the archives for what amount to living documents of a past that, as is all too clear, reverberate into the present with devastating force.
  45. The Asphalt Jungle
    Blood and trauma make an irresistible mix in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.
    • 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.
  47. The Cathedral
    The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.
  48. Aftersun
    Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking, Aftersun announces Charlotte Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers.
  49. Armageddon Time
    The film is an illustration of the transition from the ethical pliancy of youth to the moral discernment of adulthood.
  50. The Banshees of Inisherin
    As dark as things get, the film never abandons its sly sense of humor.
    • 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.
  52. Vengeance Is Mine
    Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.
  53. One Fine Morning
    The film’s storytelling is deceptively straightforward, rooted in realistic dialogue and Mia Hansen-Løve’s light touch as a visual stylist.
  54. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film is one of the supreme cinematic examinations of the body’s magnificent malleability.
  55. Funny Pages
    Funny Pages eschews the platitudes and carefully scripted character arcs that often cause coming-of-age tales to feel not only predictable but coated in a sheen of nostalgia.
  56. Close
    The film reminds us that any coming of age is a risky business where finitude and mourning are the only guarantees.
  57. Pacifiction
    Pacifiction uses its thin narrative elements as a pretense to explore the texture of uncertainty, suspicion, and inaction.
  58. 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. 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.
  60. Sidewalk Stories
    Charles Lane’s 1989 indie Sidewalk Stories doesn’t just hark back to The Kid; it formally revives the Chaplin classic in the street theater of Dinkins-era Greenwich Village.
  61. Oppenheimer
    For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.
  62. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    This is a film that projects an unflinching sincerity and optimism, and the first in the MCU, a franchise that has brought much of Marvel Comics’s wildest flights of fancy to life, to really channel the spirit of Kirby’s creations and how that first endeared them to audiences.
  63. The Blue Caftan
    The film is best experienced by simply wallowing in the lushness of its fabrics, sartorial and symbolic alike, refusing the temptation to unspool its poetic parallels.
    • 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.
  65. Dry Ground Burning
    The film surprises by revealing deeper layers to both its subjects and social commentary.
  66. Walk Up
    With each new film, Hong Sang-soo’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier.
  67. 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.
  68. Saint Omer
    If courtroom dramas are usually about taking a stand, Saint Omer shows us that the most impactful truths often go unspoken.
    • 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.
  70. 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.
  71. 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.
  72. Polite Society
    From the first blow to the last, Polite Society is a charm offensive that simply doesn’t let up.
  73. The Quiet Girl
    The Quiet Girl earns its most emotionally powerful scenes because of the way that it so gracefully convinces us that it wasn’t even building toward them in the first place.
  74. The Long Good Friday
    As a collage of glossy gangster conventions and one-liners, The Long Good Friday explodes with energy, but it’s the political and social tensions that make Mackenzie’s film a lasting vision of British tragedy.
  75. 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.
  76. 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.
  77. 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.”
  78. Beau Is Afraid
    With Beau Is Afraid, his third and easily most ambitious feature to date, Ari Aster traces, to more cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.
  79. A Thousand and One
    The film brims with authenticity and the electrifying emotional intensity of the best melodramas.
  80. The Outwaters
    With The Outwaters, the found-footage horror film has unexpectedly found its trippy, unmooring, ultraviolent answer to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the free-associative barbarity of A Page of Madness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Eileen
    The film is a pulpy phantasmagoria of fear and desire, offering visions of queer ecstasy within the confines of multiple prisons.
  82. Earth Mama
    Despite Earth Mama’s bleak subject matter, it exudes a beatific warmth, in large part because Leaf takes remarkable pains to dramatize a web of solidarity between a group of Black women alongside her depiction of the very system that disenfranchises them.
  83. Passages
    While there’s much acute pain in this compact but resonant drama, it can also be funny in a way that smacks of self-deprecation.
  84. Disco Boy
    Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas.
    • 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.
  86. Afire
    Afire builds a story that begins as a hangout comedy with a sad-sack at its center but gradually becomes a slow-motion conflagration that offers no easy answers.
  87. Tótem
    Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using its main character as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.
  88. Gods of Mexico
    If Gods of Mexico harkens back to certain traditions of visual representation, Helmut Donsantos’s counterintuitive recombination of what would seem to be mutually exclusive inspirations, each with its own temporal framework, allows him to offer for our contemplation a vision uniquely his own.
    • 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.
  90. Drive-Away Dolls
    In the classic queer punk tradition of Bruce LaBruce, John Waters, and Gregg Araki, Ethan Coen’s film knows when to pay homage and when to move to its own rhythm.
  91. 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.
  92. Trenque Lauquen Parte I
    Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.
  93. Trenque Lauquen Parte II
    Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.
  94. Here
    Bas Devos’s trademark placidity and restraint constitutes a challenge to narrative convention.
  95. About Dry Grasses
    Above all, the film captures how easy it is to deposit too much hope on the few who represent dissent, or freedom, when one is trapped.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Zone of Interest
    The soundtrack of the Hösses’ daily lives is a reminder of the nightmare taking place just beyond the wall outside their home, and these sounds, relentless in their sense of evocativeness, give an extra layer of the uncanny to Höss’s already unsettling character.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    May December
    The film examines real-world events through the lens of mass media with a wry humor that masks profoundly complex and painful undercurrents of emotion.
  98. 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.
  99. How to Have Sex
    How to Have Sex winds up delivering on the promise of its title, as this is a truly instructive film about sexual politics, though a remarkable one for largely leaving emotions unresolved and relationships feeling messy.
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