Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,767 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 6.2 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: 4,344 out of 7767
  2. Mixed: 1,490 out of 7767
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7767
7767 movie reviews
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  1. Taxi Driver
    Hitchcockian unease permeates the film, but so too does a Godardian use of space and a Bressonian focus on obsession heighten the mounting sense of dread. These elements are groovy for film buffs but are mere icing on the proverbial cake; you don’t need to be in the know to relish Scorsese’s mastery of the form, and what may astonish even more than the creative prowess is how compulsively entertaining the results are.
  2. Days of Heaven
    To hell with equivocation or beating around the bush: Terrence Malick's 1978 Days of Heaven is the greatest film ever made. And let the word film be emphasized, since Malick's sophomore masterpiece earns this exalted designation from its position as a work of pure cinema. [22 Oct. 2007]
  3. Close-Up
    Call it what you will (documentary, mockumentary, self-fulfilling prophecy), Close-Up is still the definitive film-on-film commentary.
  4. The Night of the Hunter
    Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    An electrifying achievement, drawing its high-voltage forward momentum from the collision of semi-documentary procedural, with its based-on-real-events verisimilitude, and downbeat rogue-cop revisionism.
    • 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.
  7. The Tenant
    Polanski brilliantly evokes an evil society’s almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.
  8. A Hard Day's Night
    Even when the band plays away from private eyes or songs simply play over disconnected footage of them having fun, the strength of their songcraft is stirring.
  9. 3 Women
    3 Women is a daring piece of cinema that glides along the edge of weirdness and somehow manages not to fall off.
  10. Beetlejuice
    McDowall deftly keeps one foot in the here and the other in the hereafter, which allows Burton a unique opportunity to juggle two sets of funhouse effects.
  11. Chinatown
    The exhaustive, labyrinthine narrative is built up like a fortress around this film’s bitter heart.
  12. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
    What separates Texas Chainsaw Massacre from its predecessors is its anarchic, cynical hysteria—its bizarre and dark-as-hell gallows humor.
  13. Showgirls
    Showgirls is truly one of the only ’90s films that treats pop culture as a vibrant field of social economics and cerebral pursuit, and not merely tomorrow’s nostalgia-masturbation fodder.
  14. Au hasard Balthazar
    Au Hasard Balthazar possesses a strictly balanced, bemused-unto-neigh-indifferent attitude toward delineating between the wry and the glum, the sacred and the profane.
  15. The Battle of Algiers
    Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a political tract that understands itself also as a cinematic exercise.
  16. Bad Lieutenant
    It is boldly NC-17, but unlike most exploitation cinema, Ferrara can’t seem to help himself from making the film a personal, frightened psychic diary, a pitiful shriek for help, and a powerful statement about how even the damned can achieve a moment of fleeting grace.
  17. Fargo
    Fargo, more than any of the Coens’ other work, is a study in contrast, namely in the sense that it’s made by two people who were clearly at one time insiders, but who have now taken the opportunity to see the Midwestern template from the outside. As such, every interaction in the film registers as a direct reflection of incongruous elements and repressed tensions.
  18. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    The final passages are the most exultant in their taking us beyond ourselves into a wide-eyed state of untarnished possibilities; entirely without words, the film reminds us that, despite how far we’ve come, the real odyssey has only just begun.
  19. Toy Story
    The film is virtually perfect: Nary a frame goes to waste in the establishment and development of plot and character, with the occasionally deviant touch serving to neutralize a sense of overly manufactured calculation.
  20. In the Mood for Love
    In the Mood For Love is ravishing beyond mortal words.
  21. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    A torrid journey through the subconscious of a little girl lost, Fire Walk with Me is also a cautionary tale of sorts, the sad chronicle of a sleepy town trying to rid itself of its dirty laundry.
  22. Do the Right Thing
    Lee deftly follows the actions of two dozen people on what turns out to be one of the longest, hottest, most memorable and maybe most tragic days of their lives. And he does it without so much as a single lugubrious or extraneous moment.
  23. Spirited Away
    Miyazaki celebrates individualism and nature’s simple, untainted beauties, subsequently pondering the transcendent power of communication between the “inside” and the “outside.”
  24. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven brought the revisionist revenge film into the 1990s and, by extension, the 21st century
  25. Yi Yi
    The film’s brilliance emanates equally from its structure (the story is delicately bookended by two cultural rituals: a wedding and a funeral), the acuteness of its gaze, and Yang’s acknowledgement of life as a series of alternately humdrum and catastrophic occurrences, like a flower that blooms in the summer and wilts in the fall; he hopes you will notice it, because seeing is what validates its unique extraordinariness.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Raging Bull
    Scorsese might never again find a subject as ideal as Jake LaMotta, the Bronx-based boxer whose public bouts and private demons Raging Bull chronicles with such bruising acuity.
  27. The Age of Innocence
    Martin Scorsese captures the exquisite agony and pleasure of passion that’s forced to remain theoretical.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    They Live
    It’s an effective ploy, forcing us to confront certain basic facts about the state of the world around us without sounding preachy, and it articulates a decidedly working-class anger in response to social iniquity without sounding self-righteous. And it does all of this while retaining the surface appeal of its B-movie origins, frequently (and entertainingly) indulging in the seductive spectacle of ghouls and guns in combat—though always with ulterior motives.
  29. A Clockwork Orange
    If you watch Clockwork Orange and see that this is the game Kubrick is playing with us, giving us an avenue into understanding a corrosion of society, the film may be appreciated as his finest masterwork in a career full of them. Certainly, it’s his most human film, right next to Lolita in its refusal to judge its central character’s sickness.
  30. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    Dr. Strangelove is unique as an American studio film in that nearly every scene addresses its alignment of military action with sexual impotence and bodily excretion. It’s possibly the filthiest studio comedy ever made, even though there isn’t a single gross-out gag, curse word, or graphic image in its entire running time.
  31. Ghost World
    Ghost World is a beautiful evocation of the ghostly nature of love, loss, and ultimately memory itself.
  32. Mulholland Dr.
    Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.
  33. Dead Man
    Dead Man is likely Jim Jarmusch’s most stunning achievement.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Conversation
    A shout-out to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America’s body politic in the era of Watergate.
  35. The Shining
    It’s the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror.
  36. 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.
  37. Tootsie
    The film, as a whole, isn’t quite up to the phenomenal dexterity of its lead’s exertions. But there’s a legitimate reason people love this movie so much: Pollack syphoned Hoffman’s ecstatic electricity off into a popular and old-fashioned romantic-comedy formula, bringing it back to life. Tootsie is a remarkably gentle and human pop movie that informs the term “escapism” with an almost cleansing sense of decency.
  38. The Graduate
    Director Mike Nichols exploits rather than interrogates Ben’s anxieties, so that his ennui is reducible to his accomplishments, which keep getting repeated by the adults as badges of vicarious honor. Nichols also plays Ben’s socially awkward tics for laughs, whether Ben’s literally whimpering in Mrs. Robinson’s presence or in a cold sweat as he arranges what appears to be his first sexual encounter.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Empire of the Sun
    While screenwriter Tom Stoppard supplies a literate script, it’s Spielberg’s peerless command of film technique that drives the film, with the director crafting a number of sequences that function as impressive examples of pure visual storytelling.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    In this exquisite merging of specific and universal, infinite and infinitesimal, Tokyo Story perhaps most clearly illuminates that Ozu is not the most Japanese of filmmakers, but the most human.
  41. 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    An American Werewolf in London
    The film’s indisputable centerpiece is the protracted werewolf transformation sequence.
  43. Le Rayon Vert (1986)
    Those who find Rohmer heroines difficult - that is, demanding because they are three-dimensional, non-formulaic creations with an intricate set of foibles and needs - might even be won over by the depth and poignancy of Delphine, one of its maker's most generously etched characters.
  44. The Nine Muses
    The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.
  45. In the Family
    An acutely felt, altogether devastating family drama as intimate and affecting as it is sprawling and untamed.
  46. Tomboy
    Tomboy is one of those little big films whose simplicity and concision suggest the excess of meaning that language (cinematic or otherwise) could never account for.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    It's in his generous, objective use of long shots and spare but startling close-ups that we see once again the influence of Robert Altman in Yang's aesthetic and the struggle of the Taiwanese people to accept their history. In essence, Yang uses his aesthetic to bring into the light that which is dark.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    House of Pleasures
    A brief history of time and space, according to Bertrand Bonello.
  49. Deep End (1970)
    Deep End is as soaked in pheromones and nervous electricity as Mike, but he's as much a product of the world of desire that surrounds him as one of its participants, and when the end finally comes, there's only a reprise of earlier dream imagery to suggest that there was anything other than a spasmodic, hormonal twitch involved in bringing about its conclusion.
  50. The Turin Horse
    Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he (along with co-director Ágnes Hranitzky) dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Long Day Closes
    The Long Day Closes posits its pubescent protagonist as a tiny camera absorbing and transforming the reality all around him.
  52. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    Don't let the women's smirks and wordplay fool you: The fact that art is eternal often makes it more horrifying than life itself.
  53. The Color Wheel
    Much like the work of generational cohort Michael Robinson, Alex Ross Perry's films are steeped in a viscous cultural past.
  54. The Harder They Come
    The Harder They Come’s greatest asset may still be its soundtrack, which makes such a stirring impact because it provides a cathartic release from the grim realities depicted on screen.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The World's End
    An ordinary drama embellished and in some sense infringed on by genre elements rather than the other way around.
  56. Almayer's Folly
    Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.
  57. Citizen Kane
    I still stare at it, amazed and entertained, but dwarfed by the very idea of attempting to untangle the crow’s nest that has formed through the film’s ever-expanding histories. And what continuously stupefies me is that time works no miracles on this particular film: Scenes remain familiar, but the narrative seems to shift every time I return to it.
  58. Vertigo
    Alfred Hitchcock’s rich and strange masterwork.
  59. You're Next
    Adam Wingard's You're Next brazenly merges the home-invasion thriller with the dysfunctional family dramedy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    The film's vision of masculine self-sufficiency is built around--and on, via Australia's own bloody colonial history--an elemental violence.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Consuming Spirits
    Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tabu
    The pangs of romance, eroticism, anguish, and longing (both for the stolen moments of private passion and for the sense-making schematics of Empire) transcend any period of cinema Tabu may evoke.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Room 237
    The doc positions The Shining as a comparably coiled, thematically overflowing microcosm--standing in for cinema, for history, for obsession, for postmodern theory buckling under the film's heft.
  64. The Lords of Salem
    Rob Zombie understands horror as an aural-visual experience that should gnaw at the nerves, seep into the subconscious, and beget unshakeable nightmares.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Leviathan
    Leviathan is a titanic achievement, a visceral overload whose impact registers immediately and with great force.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Badlands
    Where it’s not refined in form, Badlands is so by virtue of the specificity of its material (the then-topical sensationalism of teenage sociopaths and their glamorization in popular culture), a fact that has been buried by the dense literature published on Malick. Yet the film never once feels like the faded photos Holly examines under her father’s stereopticon.
  67. Laurence Anyways
    It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.
  68. Computer Chess
    A movie which sits at the nexus between spoken and written language, the latter mostly of the programming variety.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Voyage to Italy (re-release)
    As befits a filmmaker who defined as well as challenged the definition of Italian neorealism, Voyage to Italy unfolds as a thorny narrative and a profoundly personal documentary.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Scarecrow
    Scarecrow embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon.
  71. Her
    A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality.
  72. A Touch of Sin
    As depicted by Jia Zhang-ke, the balance between the spoils and moral rot of murder are far preferable to the debasing rigors of tradition and hollow nationalism.
  73. Museum Hours
    Jem Cohen's film finds its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects.
  74. Drug War
    The film is a singularly huge, relentless, all-encompassing set piece that mutates and spasms with terrifying lack of foresight. It's all business, business, business.
  75. To Be or Not to Be
    Many of the film’s pleasures, then, derive from watching these characters successfully use the tools of the stage (improvisation, sense memory, prosthetics) to successfully subvert the Nazis.
  76. The Wind Rises
    Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.
  77. Stranger by the Lake
    Alain Guiraudie's film portrays cruising as a danger-seeking and astoundingly repetitive affair, intimately linked to death itself.
  78. Stray Dogs
    Tsai isn't making a social-problem film here, and his critique of patriarchal control is secondary to his portrait of unbearable psychic conditions.
  79. Under the Skin
    Throughout, what truly matters to director Jonathan Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.
  80. 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.
  81. Dear White People
    Like the movie itself, every character is a beautiful swirl of contradictions.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nostalghia
    Perhaps Tarkovsky’s most opaque film, Nostalghia is nonetheless one of his most personal.
    • 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.
  84. Goodbye to Language 3D
    Cinema is a vernacular of domination, and quaking with revelations both formal and personal, the film attests that Godard has spent his career apologizing for it.
  85. Timbuktu
    The film's criticism isn't primarily rooted in satire, but rather in fury and condemnation for those who seek to be gods while shamefully feigning to follow and praise one god.
  86. Sorcerer
    Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.
  87. Level Five
    Level Five pictorializes the cruel moment when curiosity encounters tragedy, and the all-too-human abandonment of interest that can follows.
  88. Phoenix
    Christian Petzold never luxuriates in all this film history, but rather channels the artifice and affect it embodies into new insights.
  89. Story of My Death
    True to its title, the film approaches death as both narrative endpoint and formal focus, its initial vivacious mischief giving way to a Manichean fable about the waning of the light.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    It captures a kind of essential form of self-expression (and pleasure) that exceeds categorization, creating a shared experience between the musicians, the filmmakers, and the viewer that feels sublime.
  91. Li'l Quinquin
    It resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Bruno Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of Humanité.
  92. Gangs of Wasseypur
    This insane masterpiece shows the self-destructive properties of myth making and how they overlap with the downfall of a community damned from the beginning of time.
  93. Hard to Be a God
    Aleksei German's final film is choreographed with a Felliniesque social grandeur, but tethered to a neorealist's eye for detail and quotidian matters of social justice.
  94. The Forbidden Room
    Its utter indulgence in esoterica paradoxically leaves it most vulnerable to the beating heart of this great artist of self-therapy.
  95. 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.
  96. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Jafar Panahi spotlights the act of filmmaking as an act of resistance as well as a possible source of propaganda and manipulation.
  97. Queen of Earth
    Every beautiful, resonant image in writer-director Alex Ross Perry's film is fraught with neurotic, diaphanous riddles.
  98. 45 Years
    It's the summative effect of the story's modest exchanges, unspooling one after another in long, tranquil shots, that lends the film its profound sense of loss.
  99. Cemetery of Splendor
    It gently and often imperceptibly shifts between past and present, legend and modernity, wakefulness and reverie.
  100. 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.
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