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. Certain Women
    The threat of feeling slighted links every small and large ripple of drama in Kelly Reichardt's film.
  2. My Life as a Dog
    My Life as a Dog and its sublime vision of childhood will always be there to remind us of the filmmaker Hallström once was, and potentially could be again.
  3. 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.
  4. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    Little Amélie or the Character of Rain changes up its breezy account of a toddler’s growth with the occasional moment of slowed-down rumination.
  5. Heal the Living
    The film allows the sorrows of losing a life and the joys of saving it to remain congruent.
  6. Love Is Strange
    Ira Sachs's push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.
  7. The Girl Without Hands
    The film creates a deeply rooted sense of realism that contrasts the austere, surreal illustrations.
  8. Blow-Up
    Blow-Up is moving and influential for the chasms it understands to exist between people, and for its perception of art as unable to bridge those divides.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tess
    Tess is thus an almost unprecedented example of sweeping historical epic that also functions as an intense personal meditation on the capricious vicissitudes of love and death.
  10. The Assassin
    The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.
  11. In Jackson Heights
    The lightning in the film’s bottle isn’t some generic feel-good humanism, but a complicated one, fighting for its own existence, sometimes angry, sometimes despondent.
  12. Madeline's Madeline
    True to the implications of its title, the devotional insularity of Madeline's Madeline is suffocating, which is appropriate for a film about a mentally imbalanced teenage artist but suffocating nonetheless.
  13. Captain Phillips
    It works too hard to keep matters on an even, we're-all-more-alike-than-different keel, which is just one part of its chief problem of forcefully conveying information and intent.
  14. The Climb
    The film slides seamlessly between empathizing with its clueless bros and making them objects of unsparing derision.
  15. A Hero
    The film is a demonstrative examination of the way our raising of heroes onto social media pedestals diminishes the messy, sometimes impenetrable truth of human lives.
  16. The Northman
    While the canvas of Robert Eggers latest is considerably broader than that of The Witch and the Lighthouse, it feels as if its psychological chaos hasn’t expanded accordingly.
  17. Intregalde
    Întregalde is a sharply drawn and subtle fable about the meaning of charity and the limits of altruism.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Vulcanizadora
    Joel Potrykus looks without flinching at the ultimate consequences of permanent adolescence.
  19. Neruda
    Pablo Larraín has captured Pablo Neruda in all of his pomposity, pretense, courage, and undeniable genius.
  20. Blancanieves
    Pablo Berger digs for emotional intensity in his gothic retelling of Snow White and only uncovers layers of gloss.
  21. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    The film paints a vivid portrait of what life was like for Black South Africans under apartheid.
  22. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    Nuri Bilge Ceylan has to be the least kinetic of working filmmakers - and not simply in the sense of static camerawork or lack of narrative momentum.
  23. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    The documentary's labored juxtapositions create fission, the feel of a director scrambling to dictate the game.
  24. Stranger by the Lake
    Alain Guiraudie's film portrays cruising as a danger-seeking and astoundingly repetitive affair, intimately linked to death itself.
  25. The Stranger
    François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel is haunting, transportive, and tragically humanist, a worthy introduction to the text for the skeptical (or a refresher for the lapsed) and a memorably grim drama in its own right.
  26. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The title alone of Kirby Dick’s alleged documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist practically screams: This is not your standard biopic!
  27. Hold Your Fire
    The film’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by both groups aiming guns at the other.
  28. Sicario
    Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare.
  29. 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.
  30. Bacurau
    The film succeeds as a stingingly personal missive aimed squarely at Brazil’s right-wing president.
  31. The Honeymoon Killers
    The Honeymoon Killers is an intense, terrifying portrait of repression and instability.
  32. A Thousand Cuts
    The film uses endangered press freedom in the Philippines to illustrate the threat posed to liberal democracy by weaponized social media.
  33. No Home Movie
    By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.
  34. At Berkeley
    Frederick Wiseman's At Berkeley isn't only a study of the contemporary American university, but, like all of the filmmaker's best documentaries, a wide-ranging inquiry into the larger institutions and contradictions that define life in the United States.
  35. Blade Runner 2049
    Denis Villeneuve’s film is designed to reward the audience for recognizing references in the midst of an action pursuit, and, after an hour or so of the clipped and earnest signifying, one may find themselves nostalgic for Ridley Scott’s unforced indifference to the issue.
  36. Step
    By fitting Cori, Tayla, and Blessin's lives into a predetermined narrative arc, Step reduces the girls to plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps archetypes.
  37. Experimenter
    Aesthetically, the film cunningly suggests life that exists solely within an academic experiment, closed off from chaos that isn't manufactured.
  38. Eden
    Every substrata of music geekdom deserves a period piece as intimate as Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve's swan song for the golden era of French house music.
  39. The Woman Who Ran
    Hong Sang-soo invests the ironic, despairing theme of the film with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life.
  40. Mass
    In the hands of its cast, Mass gives such precise and profound expression to the totality of grief that it comes to feel downright palpable.
  41. Western
    The absence of anything traditionally "painterly" reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the kind of capitalistic pro-growth machinations on display in the film.
  42. Wadjda
    It doesn't play like reality, but like boilerplate filmic fantasy, and its novel setting and inception struggles seem positioned as a beard--or veil, if you will--to mask its mediocrity.
  43. 13th
    As with Selma, filmmaker Ava DuVernay has fashioned a work of pummeling and clear-eyed intelligence.
  44. The Inheritors
    Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.
  45. Notfilm
    Ross Lipman's gloriously egalitarian approach to culture means that his complex argumentation never becomes inaccessible.
  46. 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.
  47. The History of Concrete
    The odd and poignant The History of Concrete could be seen as a show of Buddhist acceptance on John Wilson's part of art's, and by extension life's, transience.
  48. Arrival
    The film's searching images counterpoint the hyper-articulate methodology of its characters' sense of imbalance and uncertainty.
  49. Elena
    This is a film about the invisible things passed down from generation to generation, that nasty inheritance that cages us into patterns and puzzles we try to solve in someone else's name.
  50. Weapons
    For every moment of electrifying horror, Whitest Kids U’ Know alum Zach Cregger cleanses the palette with equivalent comic relief.
  51. The Fly
    In its galvanizing portrait of a body ravaged and sexual stasis infected by bugs, The Fly might be Cronenberg’s most direct horror film ever.
  52. 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.
  53. Close
    The film reminds us that any coming of age is a risky business where finitude and mourning are the only guarantees.
  54. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Miguel Gomes's formal talents, which include a flair for close-ups of elegantly smooth or weathered faces, transcend his soft spot for the didactic.
  55. Godzilla Minus One
    For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.
  56. Closet Monster
    It's when Stephen Dunn dares to inhabit the how and not the what of queerness that Closet Monster feels authentic and deliciously strange.
  57. Godland
    The film’s unifying theme is the egocentrism and inevitable violence of masculinity.
  58. Klute
    Pakula’s seminal detective thriller, which is truly a piercing examination of loneliness.
  59. 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.
  60. Coming Home
    Coming Home is a film in which everyone's dreams are irrevocably broken, the pieces too small to grasp, let alone pick up.
  61. Living in Oblivion
    Director Tom DiCillo ingeniously structures the film as a trio of overlapping shorts that cumulatively suggest ripples emanating from a stone tossed in a pond.
  62. Coco
    The film brings Pixar's customary emotional directness to a festive, reverent, and wide-ranging pastiche of Mexican culture.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Joy
    Sergei Loznitsa's documentaries are mainly compilations of archival footage, so it makes sense that his first fiction film is also essentially a compilation, an array of dynamic, aggressive bits rather than one coherent text.
  64. Bridge of Spies
    The film has a streamlined efficiency, but it feels like the work of a master who wants to please rather than probe.
  65. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    It has generous lashings of Aardman Animations' trademark warmth, visual inventiveness, and satisfying Claymation tactility.
  66. Invisible Life
    Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.
  67. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    Radu Jude’s film is a bitterly comic essay on nationalist mythologies and historical amnesia.
  68. Foxcatcher
    Of Bennett Miller's many directorial feats, his canniest is his depiction of the precariousness of bonds, and how those bonds can shift, drastically yet almost imperceptibly.
  69. Beginners
    One of the most distinct pleasures of Beginners is the way it puts together fragments of someone's life-presumably the filmmaker's, although little does it matter-with humility, and without vying for some complete whole.
  70. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    It forays into satirical terrain in order to elide actual dealings with the problems at hand, so that each piece feels alternatively frivolous and weighty.
  71. Dolores
    Peter Bratt's documentary sharply trumpets Dolores Huerta's life and centrality in the turbulent history of social justice since the '60s.
  72. United Skates
    The documentary brings to the foreground a fascinating and, moreover, beautiful culture lurking in the background of other stories.
  73. Paris, Texas
    Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist.
  74. MLK/FBI
    The film refrains from any dubious moral calculations by giving King’s personal deceptions the same weight as his public morality.
  75. Wait Until Dark
    When the lights go out at the end of the film, so did the lights in the movie theaters.Terence Young’s tense cinematic adaptation so ruthlessly tightens the screws of tension that one could be forgiven for not noticing an earthquake, much less dimmed house lights.
  76. Jackie
    Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.
  77. Weekend
    A ticking stopwatch hangs over Weekend that amplifies the intensity of every conversation, every fight, every drink, every copulation. In other words, it's a device.
  78. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is a celebration of a profound, dying privilege.
  79. Beginning
    The low-key, serene natural beauty of Beginning’s setting provides a counterpoint to the often-disturbing events of the film.
  80. Raw
    Throughout Raw, Julia Ducournau exhibits a clinical pitilessness that’s reminiscent of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg.
  81. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order.
  82. Test Pattern
    The film strikingly punctuates the detachment of realist drama with the expressionism of psychological horror.
  83. R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.
  84. Inherent Vice
    The dangers of filmmakers trying to replicate a golden era rather than embrace the present are part and parcel of Inherent Vice, but the ramifications are political as well.
  85. Under the Sun
    Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.
  86. Wrinkles
    In its visionary dream and flashback sequences, the film becomes a comment on the rapidly diminished state of traditional animation.
  87. Little Trouble Girls
    The film fascinatingly shows how Catholic moral strictures and an underlying paganism where desire is holy are two sides of the same coin.
  88. Revenge
    Fetishism, parody, and various registers of violence propel a livewire thriller that mines the free-floating hostility existing between genders.
  89. Midnight Family
    It’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power.
  90. American Fiction
    Without spoiling its increasingly ludicrous (and ludicrously believable) escalations, American Fiction ultimately gets off scot-free clinging doggedly to the middle ground.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Leviathan
    Leviathan is a titanic achievement, a visceral overload whose impact registers immediately and with great force.
  92. Sweetie
    Sweetie’s brilliance stems from how Campion inventively explores the relationship between inanimate objects and personal memory, Sally Bongers’s static camera lingering on the precipice of a family unit brimming with secrets and lies.
    • 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.
  94. The Things You Kill
    Alireza Khatami’s third feature is a subtly enigmatic examination of the nature of masculinity.
  95. Bring Your Own Brigade
    Lucy Walker’s absorbing study of California’s 2018 wildfires consistently goes in illuminating and surprising directions.
  96. No
    A singular biopic and a snapshot of a society renewed, No unaffectedly celebrates faith in democracy, and, surprisingly, truth in advertising.
  97. Riders of Justice
    Ultimately, Anders Thomas Jensen cannot reconcile the fact that a mature story of men in crisis doesn’t coherently mesh with suspense scenes in which his protagonist viscerally annihilates a violent gang.
  98. In Fabric
    Strickland’s film is another fetish object that rues the perils of fetishism.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Django Unchained
    While the rush toward a conventional climax is confusing, and more than a little disappointing, there's an undeniable pleasure that emerges in seeing Tarantino juggle the dynamite of his ideas, even when they prematurely pop off in his face.
  100. Sister
    Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.
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