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 Woman Who Left
    It suffers by resembling arty, didactic bloat when it most begs for a more sophisticated dramatic touch.
  2. Neptune Frost
    The film thrillingly captures the social, economic, political, and material character of Rwanda in the age of global communication.
  3. Dos Estaciones
    For all its lush cinematography, capturing regional custom and dramatic panoramas alike, this is a film about repression, an inhibition that no amount of tequila can take away.
  4. Creed
    One of the Ryan Coogler film's greatest traits is its reticence, its refusal to say 10 words when two will do, or to say one word when silence says it all.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Memories of Murder
    The film is overlong at 132 minutes, but never dull or predictable, especially in delivering an ambiguous ending that goes against the grain of most Hollywood slasher films. One wishes it strayed even further from the land of the Hannibal Lecter, then we’d really have something.
  6. Monsieur Lazhar
    There's great potential for the kind of issues that are taken on, but nothing is resolved, and the biggest questions, of guilt and shame, the gulf of understanding between the first world and the third, remain unengaged.
  7. Transit
    Christian Petzold’s lean, rigorous filmmaking proves essential as the story begins to run, deliberately, in circles.
  8. Dear Comrades!
    It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.
  9. The Academy of Muses
    It's a shame that the José Luis Guerín film's verbal qualities far outpace its formal attributes.
  10. 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.
  11. The Love Witch
    The film has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision.
  12. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    In verbally recounting her history, Morrison proves almost as engaging as she in print, a wise and sensitive voice.
  13. Peter Hujar's Day
    The film attests not only to the breadth of Sachs’s artistry but also to Hujar’s devotion to exploring the relationship between high and low culture.
  14. The Killing of Two Lovers
    The film’s cramped compositions hauntingly underline the claustrophobic nature of its protagonist’s life.
  15. Night of the Kings
    The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.
  16. 3 Women
    3 Women is a daring piece of cinema that glides along the edge of weirdness and somehow manages not to fall off.
  17. These Birds Walk
    The filmmakers use a wide range of cinematic techniques to convey the tenuous environment in which their subjects find themselves.
  18. The Second Mother
    Character relations are hinted at and even primed for confrontation, but without payoff or meaningful conclusion.
  19. Anselm
    Anselm is ultimately an extension of Kiefer’s “protest against forgetting,” as it reminds us that art is an act of remembrance.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hit Man
    Many of Richard Linklater’s films are united by their celebration of the pretentious in its etymological meaning of “playing pretend.” With Hit Man, he and Glenn Powell take this further by demonstrating that acting isn’t just entertainment or art—it’s also a fundamental part of our lives.
  21. Ghostlight
    Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson are extraordinarily perceptive in highlighting the instances where stagecraft informs everyday life.
  22. 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.
  23. Wrestle
    The documentary shines a piercing light on the sorts of people that our governments would too often rather forget.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Viola
    In essentially offering up The Twelfth Night as a hazy Shakespearean mash-up, Viola isn't so much deeply disrespecting notions of ownership, authorship, etc., as charitably redefining them.
  25. The Cathedral
    The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.
  26. Relaxer
    Joel Potrykus's droll world is defined by feats of man-child pettiness, by lazy guys who turn the banalities of daily life into meaningless trials of integrity.
  27. The Deep Blue Sea
    Its director's romantic sensibilities wed to Terrence Rattigan's 60-year-old play, this period drama is buoyed by Rachel Weisz's poignant embodiment of a bourgeois wife seeking erotic autonomy.
  28. The End of the Tour
    It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.
  29. Labyrinth of Cinema
    Manic, maximalist, and bristling with postmodern bells and whistles, Labyrinth of Cinema is exactly what its title suggests.
  30. Vortex
    Merciless but affecting, Vortex suggests that one respite from the loneliness of life lived in the shadow of death is the realm of dreams.
  31. There Is No Evil
    The film grapples with the various shapes that guilt and honor (or lack thereof) might take in a context of state-sanctioned death.
  32. Thieves Like Us
    This isn’t simply another version of the mythologizing tactics that saw Bonnie Parker emulating the flappers from Gold Diggers of 1933 in Bonnie and Clyde. Altman refuses to romanticize his characters’ impressionable innocence, but nor is he resolute to assert cultural impregnability either. Instead, Altman’s emphasis lies in locating the specificities of historical time and understanding how socially constructed mythologies come to proliferate in the first place.
  33. Acasă, My Home
    The film is at its most moving when it lingers on the face of children who are impotent to return to the world they used to call home.
  34. El Velador
    El Velador doesn't pass judgment or manipulate emotionally, instead choosing simply to consider the arduousness of survival in a land wracked by slaughter.
  35. Maiden
    Director Alex Holmes ultimately takes a frustratingly simplistic approach to his thematically rich material.
  36. War for the Planet of the Apes
    The psychological wars that have made the prequels simmer with tightly wound tensions are given their most cutting treatment yet.
  37. You Won't Be Alone
    Throughout You Won’t Be Alone, writer-director Goran Stolevski rejects the slickness that defines so-called elevated horror.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Grand Tour
    If Tabu locates the colonial mindset in madness and obsession, Grand Tour does so in cowardice and obliviousness.
  39. Short Term 12
    There's tremendous dramatic value to the aching and sometimes devastating scenes that home in on these kids' private torments.
  40. House of Hummingbird
    The film is never more intense than when it’s finding parallels between its main character’s anomie and Korea’s dehumanizing expansion.
  41. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    The film is an offbeat epic informed by a reverence for the past and a delicate wariness toward the future.
  42. Our Beloved Month of August
    Gomes contemplates the many human dimensions wavering under the surface of this town, whether it’s the mythologies crowding a town’s gossip session or the tall tales flooding rants at a local bar. This is a collective voice of character rather than a dry document of reality.
  43. Grand Theft Hamlet
    Grand Theft Hamlet excels at blurring the line between low and high art.
  44. Joyland
    Joyland is full of extraordinary situations that prevent it from being defined by its topicality or tantamount to a badge of honor.
  45. Rye Lane
    Rye Lane’s antic energy and caricatured portrait of England’s capital city fail to make its central romance truly resonate.
    • 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.
  47. The Lobster
    The near-surgical precision with which Yorgos Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword.
  48. Rose of Nevada
    The film plunges us into a world that feels simultaneously naturalistic and otherworldly.
  49. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    Whereas the film is a marvel to look at, it’s unfortunately not much in the song or story department, as Danny Elfman’s musical numbers are—save for the opening’s boisterous “This Is Halloween”—generally banal and unmemorable, and the plot, despite only having to fill out a paltry 76 minutes, ultimately as emaciated and insubstantial as its leading bags of bones.
  50. Rebels of the Neon God
    Tsai Ming-liang's debut makes one yearn for an alternative reality where it, not Pulp Fiction, became the beacon of '90s independent filmmaking.
  51. Life and Nothing More
    Antonio Méndez Esparza crafts a revealing portrait of life as lived under a regime of race and class oppression.
  52. Star Trek
    Like the original cast’s best movie, The Wrath of Khan, this Star Trek essentially turns out to be a war film, with the occasional philosophical timeout to discuss love, friendship, and duty until the next bone-crunching fistfight or multi-weapon rumble with the Romulans. But Bana’s villain lacks the wit and corny majesty of Ricardo Montalban’s.
  53. They Live by Night
    Ray’s plaintive artistry lends this weepy noir a melancholic beauty.
  54. A Quiet Place
    The pleasure of A Quiet Place is in John Krasinski's commitment to imagining the resourceful ways in which a family might survive in this kind of world, then bearing witness to the filmmaker's skillfully constructed methods of putting them to the ultimate test, relentlessly breaking down all of the walls the family has erected to keep the monsters out.
  55. Riefenstahl
    If there’s still anyone uncritically repeating Riefenstahl’s narrative of naïveté, they’ll find it hard to sustain by the end credits.
  56. Carmine Street Guitars
    The film celebrates the thingness of things, as well as the assuring clarity and lucidity that can arise from devotion to knowledge.
  57. The Teachers' Lounge
    While Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge makes full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting, it doesn’t exceed its remit by turning the story into a referendum on society.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Frances Ha
    Noah Baumbach's film feels like too perfect a portrait of quarter-life malady, down to the rushed redemptive endnotes and Greta Gerwig's idealized heroine.
  59. C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon admirably doesn’t indulge in heartstring-tugging pathos, but the film suffers from a certain shapelessness.
  60. In the Family
    An acutely felt, altogether devastating family drama as intimate and affecting as it is sprawling and untamed.
  61. Burn
    The endless scenes of burning buildings and macho posturing merely provide an action-driven context for the filmmakers to deal with more personal topics like loneliness and resiliency.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Hijacking
    Tobias Lindholm's hostage-negotiation drama that wields its verité style for maximum tension.
  63. Black Sabbath
    Black Sabbath speaks to the vastness of Bava’s abilities in the realms of the terrifying and the supernatural.
  64. Nocturnes
    The film is uplifting in its understated optimism that understanding of the natural world driven by technology might accompany understanding of the divine.
  65. Black Box Diaries
    The film leaves on a razor’s edge between hope and despair, encouraged on the one hand by the passion with which justice is being demanded and, on the other, depressed by the widespread indifference with which these demands are met.
  66. The Trip
    Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's shtick - a relentless verbal sparring comprised of dueling impressions, poetry recitations, absurdist riffing, and comic one-upmanship - works best in small doses.
  67. Knives Out
    The actors’ hammy performances only compound the amusement of watching a dynasty propped up by largesse fall to pieces at the very thought of actually having to earn their way in life.
  68. The Spectacular Now
    Given the film's early promise, it's unfortunate how it turns into a largely reductive Freudian character piece in which the main character has to come to terms with his old man.
  69. My Man Godfrey
    La Cava’s supple but cutting romantic comedy is one of the finest works of class-conscious comedy in Hollywood history.
  70. Angels Are Made of Light
    The film is an intimate portrait of a nation terminally anxious about who will see fit to rule it next.
  71. 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.
  72. Rams
    Every moment in writer-director Grímur Hákonarson's strange and wonderful film is imbued with mystery and revealing dignity.
  73. The Waldheim Waltz
    Despite Beckermann’s contemplative, even-tempered tone, The Waldheim Waltz gradually builds outrage at the subterranean persistence of fascism in postwar politics.
  74. Nuts!
    Throughout, director Penny Lane strings together telling incidents and anecdotes with a light touch.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Repo Man
    Pressed, it’s hard to think of five American studio pictures as original as Repo Man. The utter weirdness of Alex Cox’s remarkable debut—a document of L.A.’s hardcore punk scene that’s also an ode to its car culture, a critique of the American middle class, and a kind-of sci-fi comedy about a radioactive Chevy Malibu—would seem to preclude its existence.
  76. Challengers
    Challengers is an intoxicating showcase for the beauty and excitement of bodies in motion.
  77. Pig
    Nicolas Cage, in full martyr mode here, seems to get off on the perversity of, well, caging his brand of operatic hysteria.
  78. Marjorie Prime
    Mapping the intersection between history and emotion, Michael Almereyda finds himself in Alain Resnais terrain.
  79. Sorry We Missed You
    It’s difficult to imagine a more socially engaged or powerful condemnation of the exploitative gig economy than Ken Loach’s latest.
  80. Sisters with Transistors
    Much of the film’s power comes from a series of deft, often wry juxtapositions between video and audio.
  81. Lost Course
    What distinguishes the film from ordinary journalism, and what constitutes its intervention in reality, is a difference in timescale.
  82. Steve Jobs
    The screenwriter's signature verbal-diarrhetic dialogue allows for a nonstop blaring of actorly chops that, like the movie at large, is nothing if not committed.
  83. Marley
    The bloat and heft of Marley's narrative scope leaves the viewer awash in a sea of historical "facts" with very little sense of the human experience behind the curtain of celebrity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Le Havre
    For Carl Dreyer, to film a miracle took a single shot; for Bruno Dumont, a whole film. In Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki needs four shots to capture his - and what an ordinary event it is!
  85. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers is ultimately a story about the absence of family, and as it watches three individuals come together and apart, it’s subtly attuned to the way that class constricts people’s lives.
  86. From Ground Zero
    The film is a stirring testament to art as a tool of survival, to the power of community art-making to affirm life in the face of omnipresent death, and to a nationless people’s desire to be seen by and engage in dialogue with the community of nations.
  87. To Be Heard
    This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.
  88. Araby
    A carefree life on the move is steadily and exquisitely overtaken by melancholy in writer-directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa’s Arábia, the portrait of a meandering journey fueled by song, anecdote, and landscape that zeroes in on the pressures of contemporary Brazil almost in passing.
  89. Sound of Metal
    Darius Marder’s film captures, with urgency and tenderness, just how enticing the residue of the past can be.
  90. Embrace of the Serpent
    Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.
  91. Under African Skies
    It does lightly suggest scintillating questions about the responsibility artists have in reflecting current political moments in their music.
  92. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    True to its name, the film puts the concept of forgiveness on display and asks us to spend some time in front of it and consider it from all angles.
  93. 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.
  94. Da 5 Bloods
    Lost in so much bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Spike Lee’s critique of America.
  95. Side by Side
    A serviceable primer on the digital-celluloid divide in commercial cinema, if a bit unwieldy in scope and in danger of being made obsolete by the next version of the RED camera.
  96. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    The film simultaneously announces itself as an expressive portrait of a city, an endearing ode to male comradery, a leisurely paced hangout flick, an absurdist comedy, and a melancholic reflection on gentrification and urban black experience.
  97. Isle of Dogs
    Anderson is clearly a massive talent working, again, in his prime. However uncomfortable, it's crucial to ask what gives him the right to romp around in all these signifiers in service of bespoke whimsy—but then the word for it isn't “right,” but rather privilege.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Mysteries of Lisbon
    A marvelously elastic storyteller, a dry wit, and a Rivettean anti-determinist, the Chilean auteur Raúl Ruiz is fascinated by narratives that dilate from within, images seemingly full of secret passageways, and fabulists who collect tales like toys.
  99. Flamenco, Flamenco
    It's as if Carlos Saura were calling the bluff of spectacle-oriented narrative cinema that necessitates excusing its excesses with characters and plotting.
  100. Approaching the Elephant
    The film's 90 minutes are a disorienting cyclone of destructive incidents and propulsive energy.
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