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. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    Silent Night, Deadly Night brought the idea to new levels of cold sleaziness.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Crimes of Passion
    Russell’s wild style and shameless exhibitionism places it on a par with the contemporary work of Brian De Palma in terms of its vicious satire of ‘80s kitsch and repression.
  5. Last Hurrah for Chivalry
    Not yet a master, Woo here nonetheless demonstrates far more than mere potential as he starts to lay the foundations for his breakout successes.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Red Dawn
    What if Reagan’s America got a taste of her own interventionist foreign policies? Apocalypse, wow.
  7. Crimes of the Future
    Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.
  8. Purple Rain
    Magnoli’s professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film’s climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince’s vanity project entirely justifiable.
  9. The Karate Kid
    The Karate Kid might have been more endurable, maybe even endearing, if its runtime had been trimmed of a solid 30 minutes.
  10. Once Upon a Time in America
    As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.
  11. Streets of Fire
    Walter Hill’s 1984 film combines everything from seedy bars, street fights, motorcycles, beefy heavies, and tough dames in a smorgasbord of tawdry, moral-flouting clichés that distills decades of imagery that represents youth in cinema.
  12. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
    Temple of Doom doesn't so much pay tribute to the serial adventures of yore as it does embody them. Here, frivolity and evil blithely coexist—and women are a lot more likely to scream than win drinking contests.
  13. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
    Even though we would see more of Jason over the years (first as a zombie, then battling a telekinetic super-girl, taking on Freddy Krueger within his own warped dreams, even hacking teens to bits in outer space), this one certainly felt as if it properly closed out the Friday the 13th series before it devolved into unadulterated camp.
  14. Suburbia
    In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Romancing the Stone
    Directed by an unimaginative Robert Zemeckis three years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, it uses Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones franchise as the template through which to bolster Douglas’s public machismo.
  16. L'Argent
    Robert Bresson's film hits with the effect not so much reflecting a cleansing of the soul, but rather a ransacking.
    • 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.
  18. Tenebrae
    Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It’s both a riveting horror film and an architect’s worst nightmare.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    El Norte
    El Norte deserves credit for being one of the first films to engage American cinema in a discourse on the immigrant experience, but its approach to the material—shallow, condescending, and hectoring—undermines its stabs at brutal realism.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Nostalghia
    Perhaps Tarkovsky’s most opaque film, Nostalghia is nonetheless one of his most personal.
  21. BMX Bandits
    Ignoring the fact that BMX Bandits is as intimate as a trip to Toys “R” Us, it has almost nothing to offer in the way of impressive stuntwork, carefree yuks, or semi-competent acting. Trenchard-Smith, a master at condescending to his audience, clearly diluted Hagg and Edgeworth’s already toothless concept; that said, there was probably no good way to dress up a line as dire as “You’re right in the poo now, sister” or even “Your little walkie talkies have gone walkies.”
  22. Sleepaway Camp
    Seriously, watching Angela (and to a lesser extent Ricky) being targeted throughout the film is like watching a group of shrill brats shooting rocks at a baby bird—if it wasn’t so obvious that everyone’s non-stop cruelty was in service of some big-reveal, or if the performances weren’t so damn preening, the film would be completely intolerable.
  23. Amityville 3-D
    Amityville 3-D—one-dimensional in every way but its hokey visuals—is too poorly written, awkwardly staged, and pathologically stupid to register as campy fun.
  24. The Beyond
    Even by Argento standards, Fulci’s film is nonsensical to the point of distraction.
  25. Born in Flames
    It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Possession
    Many directors have taken full advantage of Adjani’s exotic, ethereal French beauty; only Zulawski saw beyond the exquisite surface to something unsettling. Most disconcerting is the way Adjani can register almost demonic ill-intent while never losing some trace of the alluring.
  27. The Right Stuff
    The titular “stuff” is shown to be a combination of courage, determination, and recklessness, but, as Kaufman’s stirring epic reminds us, an equally important motivation for greatness is the fear of being merely second best.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brainstorm
    As though this ridiculousness weren’t sufficiently groan-inducing, the scenes depicting the mischief Brace wreaks on the corporation while he’s mid-hack undergo a bizarre tonal shift into Keystone Kops slapstick.
  29. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    A prisoner-of-war drama as fever dream, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements: in performance, pop-star charisma versus British actorliness; in narrative style, genre expectations coming up against modernist psychosexual undercurrents.
  30. Cujo
    To be blunt, because there was just barely enough material in the source text to pad out the film, the filmmakers also used a lot of the stuff that worked in novel form but came off as stultifying on the screen.
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