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. Robot Dreams
    Pablo Berger's film effortlessly brings a sense of universality to its story.
  2. Anselm
    Anselm is ultimately an extension of Kiefer’s “protest against forgetting,” as it reminds us that art is an act of remembrance.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Close Your Eyes
    Where once Victor Erice's films defined the unknown as a life not yet experienced, Close Your Eyes interprets it as a life already lived, slowly dissolving into memory.
  4. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    The protagonist may feel cut off from the world, but the film is deeply in harmony with it.
  5. La Chimera
    In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone.
  6. The Settlers
    The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.
  7. Users
    The film’s triumph is keeping us on our toes by sending us into an ether where fear and wonder live hand in hand.
  8. The Gullspång Miracle
    The film is a philosophical account of the shaky ground that human existence stands on.
  9. 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Boy and the Heron
    The true tragedy of The Boy and the Heron seems not to be that the blemishes of its fantasy mirror those of its reality, but that any one person should think themselves capable of sanitizing either.
  11. Minamata Mandala
    The film understands how atrocity is perpetuated, fanning a maddening sense of injustice.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    The film further confirms Radu Jude as one of the most idiosyncratic, uncompromising, and intellectually vigorous of living filmmakers.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Winter Kills
    Even if you don’t go in with a conspiratorial mindset, one viewing of this riotously entertaining, chillingly perceptive film could leave you wondering if some larger force is at play, protecting the targets of this should-be New Hollywood classic by keeping it in the dark after all this time.
  14. Eureka
    The genre trappings are familiar, but this isn’t any old horse opera.
  15. Oceans Are the Real Continents
    With the film, Tommaso Santambrogio puts neorealism in the service of dream.
  16. Io Capitano
    The film builds on a docudrama realism while also reaching toward the mythological.
  17. Gasoline Rainbow
    The film is rich in compositions that seem to cut to the essence of the characters’ yearnings.
  18. Nosferatu
    Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.
  19. Civil War
    Frightening, even-tempered, and disarmingly humane, Civil War is intelligent precision filmmaking trained on an impossible subject.
  20. I Heard It Through the Grapevine
    Dick Fontaine and Pat Harley’s documentary makes the political personal at every turn.
  21. The Brutalist
    Brady Corbet builds on celluloid what Adrien Brody’s László Toth does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character.
  22. A Different Man
    The film’s overarching dramatic irony leaves one to ponder the deliberately discomfiting question of whether it’s possible to extricate the experience of disability from the way spectators define its essence.
  23. The Substance
    The humanity of Demi Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Coralie Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat.
  24. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    Tim Burton’s belated sequel to 1988’s weird, wild, and hilariously macabre Beetlejuice abounds in morbid, nauseating delights.
  25. Kill
    Kill continually finds clever ways to defy our expectations through the particular placement of dramatic beats, surprising shifts in tone, and even just the way it keeps flipping the geography of the action.
  26. Between the Temples
    A wealth of contrasting stimulation gives the film a singular and intimate atmosphere, in which scenes can last little eternities while still leaving you feeling as if you’re struggling to keep up with a stream of secrets and in-jokes.
  27. 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.
  28. A Real Pain
    The film is levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance.
  29. In a Violent Nature
    Think of Chris Nash’s film as Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Crystal Lake.
  30. Ghostlight
    Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson are extraordinarily perceptive in highlighting the instances where stagecraft informs everyday life.
  31. Tuesday
    This is a film of tremendous emotion, spirit, and paradoxically restraint and ambition.
  32. Girls Will Be Girls
    The film is one that fully recognizes the power of a lingering gaze, a suppressed smile, the slightest movement of the littlest finger, and one which uses them all to maximum effect.
  33. Concrete Valley
    Concrete Valley reveals itself as a thrilling example, both in form and content, of the way that the fostering of community allows us to regain some measure of control over life’s adversities.
  34. 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.
  35. Dahomey
    Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage.
  36. No Other Land
    With exceptional lucidity, No Other Land reminds us of the human stakes of Israel’s resettlement of the West Bank, and that fighting for justice starts from the ground up.
  37. The Wild Robot
    The film’s discernible brushstrokes serve as a reminder of the literal hands, the labor, it takes to raise someone, mold them into a survivor, and to carry love with you wherever you go.
  38. Dying
    The film’s diligent script and nuanced performances are such that the depressing material stops short of turning into a depressing experience.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Messiah of Evil
    Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s eerily brooding Messiah of Evil remains an undervalued gem of American gothic filmmaking.
  40. Grand Theft Hamlet
    Grand Theft Hamlet excels at blurring the line between low and high art.
  41. West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty
    Med Hondo’s is a bravura spectacle of intellectual and cinematic daring.
  42. Slow
    Slow steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another.
  43. Nickel Boys
    RaMell Ross’s remarkable film finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Colson Whitehead’s prose.
  44. All We Imagine as Light
    Writer-director Payal Kapadia has created an exceptional document of a city and its people.
    • 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.
  46. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest how our idea of Christmas is a river of memories real and imagined.
  47. 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.
  48. Viet and Nam
    Truong Minh Quy’s new queer romance-cum-sociohistorical lament mines beauty from both collective desolation and individual endurance.
  49. The Devil's Bath
    Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala depict Agnes’s plight with empathy but with a horror maven’s sense of ratcheting unease and encroaching doom.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    July Rhapsody (2002)
    Ann Hui’s investment in her characters and their passions bleeds through every frame.
  51. 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.
  52. Sullivan's Travels
    Preston Sturges jammed volumes of sociological concerns into a 90-minute satire with Sullivan’s Travels, Hollywood’s greatest comedy.
  53. By the Stream
    Art is a mode of potential connection built in large part on narcissism, and Hong Sang-soo is without peer these days in wrestling that irony onto the screen.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Hard Truths
    Even at its funniest, Hard Truths finds Marianne Jean-Baptiste channeling an anger that feels excruciatingly real.
  55. Trafic
    If Playtime’s enormous scope was visionary, here Tati’s tone is that of a bemused, unshakably certain philosopher.
  56. Youth (Homecoming)
    Throughout his trilogy, Wang Bing’s modus operandi has been expansion through repetition, a recursive exploration of similar spaces that nevertheless exhibits differing emotions, concerns, and personalities.
  57. Sinners
    Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.
  58. The Cranes Are Flying
    One of the greatest films of the Soviet era.
  59. The Visitor
    The Visitor ultimately posits a vision of transcendence through anarchy, seeing repression as the enemy of social progress.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
    Right from its stylish and violently kinetic opening, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed establishes itself as one of the finest of the seven entries in Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle.
  61. The Colors Within
    The film is able to suggest great depths by withholding so much, by having characters express what they feel only in abstract terms during a fraught, transitional period of their lives.
  62. 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.
  63. 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.
  64. The Virgin of the Quarry Lake
    Laura Casabé abstracts the typical emotions of tortured teens, only to then amplify them.
  65. The Perfect Neighbor
    Geeta Gandbhir’s trenchant documentary takes incendiary material and aims it at a larger target.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Fishing Place
    Rob Tregenza is always questioning what can be accomplished with the simple building blocks of cinema.
    • 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.
  68. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
    Right out of the gate, the filmmakers’ filtering of a James Bond-esque espionage tale through a grindhouse sensibility exists in such a state of emphatic stimulation that each shot feels punctuated with an exclamation point.
  69. Take Out
    Economic anxiety is rarely spoken about in the film, but the life-and-death importance of dollars and cents is felt in every frame.
    • 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.
  71. 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.
  72. Die My Love
    To dismantle the mythologies of maternity, Lynne Ramsay's tool of choice is the sledgehammer rather than the scalpel.
  73. The Chronology of Water
    The beauty of Kristen Stewart’s focus is how she excavates the profound from the mundane.
  74. Sound of Falling
    The past comes off in Mascha Schilinski’s film as an onerous, if unseen, weight on the present.
  75. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    The film pokes fun at the conventions of detective stories but never becomes so self-aware that you stop taking it seriously.
  76. Diciannove
    In line with his protagonist’s ever-shifting whims, a spirit of restless reinvention characterizes director Giovanni Tortorici’s aesthetic approach.
  77. Father Mother Sister Brother
    More than any other Jim Jarmusch film, Father Mother Sister Brother is haunted by mortality and the inevitable passage of time.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Two Seasons, Two Strangers
    In beautifully quiet ways, Two Seasons, Two Strangers captures its characters in the realm of the ineffable, making the mundane utterly sublime.
  79. Blue Heron
    There’s a low-key warmth to Romvari’s painstaking portrait of quotidian family life, as her documentarian attention to detail creates an intoxicatingly vivid rendering of 1990s suburbia.
  80. Cover-Up
    Cover-Up is a sweeping, if tempered, tribute to investigative journalism, attesting to its enduring importance at a time when resources for it have substantially declined.
  81. What Does That Nature Say to You
    Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetic is key to the resonance of his latest examination of an artist’s life.
  82. His Girl Friday
    One of the greatest and most mercenary of all American comedies.
  83. The Currents
    While The Currents can certainly be read as a portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, it also offers a more expansive view of mental illness as a sensitivity not wholly pathological, but rather capable of reframing and refreshing the world.
  84. Mistress Dispeller
    The film is sensitively attuned to how people’s feelings are shaped by cultural norms.
  85. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
    This endlessly playful, humorous, and mirthfully gory film is pure Jane Schoenbrun.
  86. Josephine
    Beth de Araújo’s sophomore feature is a harrowing chronicle of a premature maturation.
    • 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.
  88. In a Whisper
    Leyla Bouzid’s ability to capture the complexities and contradictions of familial affection is what makes In a Whisper so impressive.
  89. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
    From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.
  90. 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.
  91. Casino Royale
    Casino Royale is one of the good ones and not just for the way it wittily recontextualizes several series touchstones.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Idiocracy
    Idiocracy is too scattershot and compromised to push the conceptual bleakness beyond the realm of lowbrow comedy, though Judge’s cultural ire remains bracing throughout: For all the characters’ slapsticky imbecility, Judge makes it clear that it’s their docile acceptance (read: political inactivity) that makes them true dumbasses.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Downtown 81
    This time capsule of bohemian New York distorts its representation of the city for reasons more loving than lazy.
  94. Blood Simple
    There's a simple magnetism inherent in this kind of filmmaking, and the Coens know how to orchestrate it.
  95. 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Evil Dead II
    Sam Raimi’s sequel/remake is full-on gore slapstick, more Tex Avery than Dario Argento.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pretty in Pink
    Whereas Mean Girls used a visual metaphor turning students into ravaging lions as a dull-headed joke, Hughes created a lion’s den that felt perilously real.
  98. Band of Outsiders
    More than lifting from and reconfiguring the artifacts of auteurist Hollywood, Band of Outsiders sees Godard parsing out his feelings for Karina, then his wife (they divorced soon after the film was completed), and meditating on the mercurial nature of his own preoccupations.
  99. Mission: Impossible
    Unlike most action films, Mission: Impossible's distinct appeal operates not so much on suspense but on improbability.
  100. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    The thorough goofiness the film luxuriates in, as compared to the covert self-seriousness of nearly every teen comedy ever made, sets Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure apart and heads and tails above the glut of its ilk. Most triumphant, indeed.
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