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. Casablanca
    The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed.
  2. Columbus
    The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.
  3. Miss Kiet's Children
    Childhood in Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch's documentary is the terrain of contradiction and ambiguity.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blow Out
    Blow Out is not known as one of Brian De Palma’s horror movies, but of all his films, it’s the one that feels most like a nightmare.
  5. 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.
  6. Carrie
    Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley whales across Nancy Allen’s face.
  7. 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.
  8. Body Double
    Body Double, while not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma’s signature film. It’s a wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it’s worth. Hell, try taking on all three at once.
  9. Night of the Living Dead
    A stark, eerie and unrelenting parable of dread. There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.
  10. Dawn of the Dead
    Romero’s distinctly Pittsburghian sensibilities can’t be underestimated when explaining Dawn’s appeal; the Monroeville Mall perfectly evokes the feel of a hollow monument standing at the center of a community that couldn’t be bothered to define itself any more distinctively than could be represented by their choice between Florsheim or Kinney’s shoes. The mall, in essence, shoulders the burden of their identity.
  11. Day of the Dead
    Here, a pessimistic Romero dares to tackle the very essence of man’s inhumanity to man. And in the end, Day of the Dead is every bit as compelling and unsettling as its more lauded predecessors.
  12. Mommie Dearest
    Inscrutably powerful and brutally honest about diva worship as another form of male domination, Mommie Dearest is to camp what Medea was to Dr. Benjamin Spock.
  13. Dressed to Kill
    The pleasures of Dressed to Kill flat out do not translate to print, but for what it’s worth it is the most perfectly-directed film ever, provided you, like me, bust into orgasmic laughter when De Palma’s double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat Nancy Allen and a wooden cop can see boarding the subway is a 250-pound bag lady.
  14. Suspiria
    Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =
  15. First Reformed
    After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and skepticism that’s as reverent as it is blasphemous.
  16. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.
  17. Zama
    How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.
  18. 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.
  19. Apocalypse Now Redux
    With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. One of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    House of Games
    His meticulous, largely self-taught directing style—dazzlingly showcased in House of Games, a master class in dramatically functional compositions and camera moves—should be mandatory viewing for any would-be filmmaker.
  22. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Every pan and snap zoom and dissolve is exact, every whorl of smoke and wind-thrown swath of leaves pulled from a dream and placed methodically before our eyes.
  23. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    The film is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rebel Without a Cause
    Where the attitudes of "East of Eden" are hopelessly dated and broad, the poetic longing for connection in Rebel Without a Cause will always feel timeless.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bridge on the River Kwai
    Whereas Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago feel more pictorial than cinematic, The Bridge on the River Kwai carefully builds its psychological tension until it erupts in a blinding flash of sulfur and flame.
  26. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. Personal Problems (1980)
    Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed collapse conventional notions of reality, providing simultaneous glimpses into the minds of dozens of characters, lingering on scenes and informing them with confessional intensity.
  30. Picnic at Hanging Rock
    It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil.
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