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. 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.
    • 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.
  3. Dekalog (1988)
    The biblical root of the [Dekalog] may suggest didacticism on its face, but whatever morals are advanced are decidedly ambivalent.
  4. Compensation
    Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.
    • 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Casablanca
    The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed.
  8. Boyhood
    Richard Linklater's film is an experiment in time, and one that's attentive to the audience's sense of empathy.
  9. Notorious
    Love is a dark, corroded obsession in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a black-velvet biocide brimming with notes of tabloid titillation, spy-versus-spy nonsense, and romance as rotten as a half-eaten Granny Smith left out in the summer sun.
  10. Vertigo
    Alfred Hitchcock’s rich and strange masterwork.
  11. Singin' in the Rain
    Many things reinforce the enduring greatness of Singin’ in the Rain, but its most charming element is the filmmakers’ love for and dedication to the basic tenants of cinema as pure enchantment, and an open indulgence of all the bells and whistles that have been allowed it to grow into something bigger and (arguably) better over the decades.
  12. Playtime
    With Playtime, Tati made one of the most fully inhabitable films ever.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    City Lights
    The first great peak in City Lights, the boxing scene, may be the most brilliant single comedy sequence of his career, not least because of the participation of Hank Mann, who plays the Tramp’s Bluto-like opponent in the ring, and Eddie Baker, who plays the referee.
  14. Moonlight
    What tends to right Moonlight, even when Barry Jenkins's filmmaking drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.
  15. Intolerance
    Likely the most influential film ever made.
  16. The Rules of the Game
    Low comedy walks hand and hand with tragedy and beauty throughout; the film is frothy one minute, nearly apocalyptic the next, and so you’re never fully allowed to gather your bearings.
  17. Pinocchio
    Pinocchio redeemed Disney from the parlor trickery of Snow White and suggested animated features could indeed dance without strings.
  18. 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.
    • 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.
  20. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
    The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is as enduring a classic as has ever come out of Hollywood, and arguably among the greatest, but the film is admittedly not without its share of rough spots.
  21. Some Like It Hot
    Magnificently paced and terrifically funny at nearly every turn, Some Like It Hot was imbued with an inherent distrust of capitalism and big business that Wilder regularly expressed in an only slightly covert manner.
  22. North by Northwest
    The picture is hugely pleased with itself, but it’s too funny and expertly calibrated to mind in the least. Both Hitchcock and Grant raise relaxed confidence to masterpiece level here.
  23. Rashomon
    The film is still one of the most glorious testaments to the frustrations and exhilarations of chasing an unvarnished truth.
  24. The Passion of Joan of Arc
    The Passion of Joan of Arc remains the moment that [Dreyer] guided his medium to new heights, and also crafted a work that would endure outside of any specific context.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    It represents some of the first and most essential steps into a new age of filmmaking.
  26. My Left Foot
    One hundred and six minutes is entirely too short a time span for Sheridan to cover Christy's entire life, but the performances are so profound they successfully fill in any and all gaps.
  27. The Night of the Hunter
    Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance.
  28. Le Petit Soldat (re-release)
    Compared to "Breathless," Le Petit Soldat's images suggest a stronger sense of place, as characters seem inextricably linked to their environment. Overall, the film lacks the artifice of Hollywood cinema, which Godard admired but was looking to move past after catching flack from the French left wing.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Third Man
    Although he’s only on screen for a fraction of the film’s running time, Lime (Welles) stands out as one of the screen’s most chilling embodiments of the banality of evil, and a perfect stand-in for Third Man’s vision of moral breakdown in post-WWII Europe.
  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. Psycho
    Felt in the full impact of a theatrical screening (with the pleasure of seeing patrons reflexively kick or stiffen at the sight of Miles startled by her mirrored reflection), its power is not just that of a showman’s calibrated scare machine, but of a somber fugue on the trapped 20th-century creatures who inhabit its world, clawing but never budging an inch.
  32. Parasite
    The only thing that keeps Parasite just slightly below the tier of Bong’s best work, namely The Host and his underrated and similarly themed 2000 debut film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is the overstuffed pile-up of incident that occurs toward the end.
  33. Battleship Potemkin
    A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.
  34. 12 Angry Men
    What's most interesting about the intense deliberations that ensue, specifically when a piece of seemingly indisputable evidence is brought back into question, is how a fresh angle and perspective, usually born from Juror 8's critical thinking, can permanently alter the tone of the discussion.
  35. Dumbo
    In its scant 64-minute running time, the big-top melodrama of Dumbo reduces me to a blubbering, mucus-drizzling wreck at least once with every viewing.
  36. Roma
    Roma is autobiography as autocritique, and in exploring a point of view adjacent to his own, Cuarón appears to have rediscovered his identity as a filmmaker.
  37. 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.
  38. Spirited Away
    Miyazaki celebrates individualism and nature’s simple, untainted beauties, subsequently pondering the transcendent power of communication between the “inside” and the “outside.”
  39. 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.
  40. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    Questlove’s Summer of Soul is as much an essential music documentary as it is a public service.
  41. The Shop Around the Corner
    The charm of the gimmick in Lubitsch’s take (directing a script by Samuel Raphaelson, who had collaborated with the German-born filmmaker on comedies and melodramas alike) is passed over quickly in favor of studying both its effects on those involved, as well as the dynamics of the workplace at large.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Breathless
    What remains most striking, and most moving, about Godard’s first feature is its sophisticated yet largely guileless faith in the filmic medium, a cinephilia untainted by smugness or cynicism.
  43. 12 Years a Slave
    Steve McQueen's film practically treats Solomon Norhtup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education.
  44. Manchester by the Sea
    Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy.
  45. The Battle of Algiers
    Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a political tract that understands itself also as a cinematic exercise.
  46. 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.
  47. Nashville
    Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.
    • 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.
  49. Rosemary's Baby
    Rosemary’s Baby is one of horror cinema’s all-time slow burns, drawing viewers gradually into entertaining the possibility that the movie’s series of strange coincidences and accumulating sense of dread are only subjective representations of Rosemary’s unraveling mental state.
  50. The Philadelphia Story
    Add Hepburn’s persona, beautifully explored here in all its wonder, and Stewart’s likeability, and George Cukor’s sensible, subtle, and lovingly unrushed direction of a firecracker script…the result is a studio picture far deeper and richer than its whimsical surface style might lead you to believe.
  51. 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.
  52. The Grapes of Wrath
    Too many films these days trivialize poverty as an ironically, tastelessly over-produced pageant to earn kudos. The Grapes of Wrath is flawed, but it captures that shiver of panic that grips anyone for whom the money for the next meal is unknown. The film remains a vital document of the perversion and torment of the fantasy most commonly known as the American Dream.
  53. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.
  54. Children of Paradise (1945)
    Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.
  55. Gravity
    Alfonso Cuarón's triumph is an invigoratingly clean, elegant display of action choreography, a La Région Centrale you can still take grandma to see.
  56. Fantasia
    It’s unquestionably among Disney’s masterpieces.
  57. L'Argent
    Robert Bresson's film hits with the effect not so much reflecting a cleansing of the soul, but rather a ransacking.
  58. Don't Look Now
    It figures that the sex scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now has become more legendary than the film itself. Forget that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were off-screen lovers at the time, the film’s infamous bedroom romp is every bit as devastating and organic as anything else in the film.
  59. Virunga
    This is muckraking journalism that moves confidently with the brio of an action thriller.
  60. One Battle After Another
    Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark comedy One Battle After Another turns overreaching into an art form.
  61. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    What's most stirring about Céline Sciamma's film is the lack of artifice in Héloïse and Marianne's feelings for one another.
  62. I Am Not Your Negro
    The film makes no concessions about its dissatisfaction with the whole rotten lot of so-called western democracy.
    • 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.
  64. Aftersun
    Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking, Aftersun announces Charlotte Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amour
    This isn't the work of a newly moral or humanistic filmmaker, but another ruse by the same unscrupulous showman whose funny games have been beguiling us for years.
  66. Anatomy of a Murder
    Preminger had the confidence in his performers and faith in his intelligent viewers: a happy combination.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Zero Dark Thirty
    Doubtless, Kathryn Bigelow's greatest strengths emerge when she can more freely flex her muscles as an action filmmaker.
  68. Collective
    The film reminds us that without investigative reporting there’s no democracy, and that traditional expectations around impartiality and objectivity may be untenable in the face of horror.
  69. A Separation
    Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    Visually drab and flabby around the edges. Its seamy tale of murder is not layered in any way; what you see (or, in Wilder’s case, hear) is what you get.
  71. 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.
  72. His Girl Friday
    One of the greatest and most mercenary of all American comedies.
  73. Carol
    The film dares its viewers to consider that--for a couple of hours, at least--even when a thing seems too good to be true, it might not be.
  74. Before Midnight
    These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape.
  75. Amazing Grace
    It offers a profound glimpse of one of the greatest and most influential voices in modern music.
  76. Dunkirk
    In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.
  77. 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.
  78. 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.
  79. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    The protagonist may feel cut off from the world, but the film is deeply in harmony with it.
  80. 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.
  81. Mr. Turner
    An astute summation of Mike Leigh's glum view of humanity, but also a challenge to this disposition and his own pessimistic perspective.
  82. The Irishman
    Scorsese knows what his audience is hoping for: glory days, resurrected. But he also understands the impossibility of anyone being exactly as they once were. So he weaves that longing into both The Irishman‘s text and its technique.
  83. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Chantal Akerman’s 1975 experiment in film form, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is an astonishing work of subtextual feminism which has to count as one of the seminal films of the 1970s.
  84. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    Isao Takahata makes survival the thematic core of the story, but he never degrades his characters or fetishizes their suffering.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shadow of a Doubt
    Hitch’s habit of taking us to the edge of the abyss and then returning us with a wink, so often resulting in unconvincing happy endings, here seals one of his most pitiless visions of a monstrous cosmos admitted only to be denied.
  86. Inside Out
    Both wonderfully complex and weirdly reductive at the same time—a formula, though, that seems as sound an embodiment of the human brain as any other.
  87. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    The drama is all surface, in other words. And what a surface, for sure. A literal life and death struggle that’s exceedingly of this moment. Yet the best documentaries tend to have formidable underlying narratives working in concert with their overlying ones.
  88. Meet Me in St. Louis
    Vincente Minnelli’s most acclaimed musical, Meet Me in St. Louis is a fresh breath of stale air, a tart ode to nostalgia.
  89. Sunset Boulevard
    Sunset Boulevard posits that the business and process of making films can often turn writers and directors into soulless scavengers of narrative detritus, performers into howling husks of wasted talent.
  90. The Apartment
    The tone of The Apartment differs from both those darkly moral movies and the filmmaker’s farces, finding a middle ground of somber tragedy that undercuts the awkward comedy of manners between the characters.
  91. We Were Here
    Simply and devastatingly letting five residents of San Francisco share their reminiscences of that city's nightmarish "war zone" in the early, horrific years of AIDS, We Were Here creates a harrowing, streamlined oral history.
  92. Faces Places
    Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.
  93. 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]
  94. Past Lives
    Diverging from romances in which lovers are expected to move heaven, earth, and themselves in order to make a moment of love last forever, Past Lives asks us to embrace the changes that come with time.
  95. Chimes at Midnight
    Welles is at the height of his powers while reveling in the poetic force of Falstaff’s weakness.
    • 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.
  97. Call Me by Your Name
    Call Me by Your Name is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story that's at its finest in moments when the relationships take on larger meanings than their literal context implies, and Luca Guadagnino finds evocative aesthetic expressions for them.
  98. Trenque Lauquen Parte I
    Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.
  99. Trenque Lauquen Parte II
    Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.
  100. 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.
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