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. 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.
  2. Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    This strange time capsule of late 1960s dementia more or less lives up to its oddball reputation—too unnerving to fall into the category of horror comedies but too cutesy to be labeled as a straight-up shocker a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In other words, it’s unclassifiable, which has amplified its cult appeal.
  3. 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.
  4. Valley of the Dolls
    Look, fun is fun, and there’s plenty of the kitschy brand to be had from the riot of late-‘60s production design and lurid plot developments.
  5. Navajo Joe
    Navajo Joe plays more like a ’50s B western in its fluid pacing, compact narrative construction, and hokey emphasis on star power than it does the kinds of sprawling genre re-workings common to its era.
  6. Cool Hand Luke
    Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout, bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat, but the film’s efforts to sentimentally humanize him by psychological revelation are clumsy.
  7. 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.
  8. Point Blank
    Though Point Blank is rife with existential malaise, it is also one of the most ferociously sexy crime movies ever made.
  9. Bonnie and Clyde
    Though Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Dorado
    Pangs of déjà vu might strike while watching El Dorado, as it’s a thinly-veiled remake of an earlier John Wayne film directed by Howard Hawks and co-written by Leigh Brackett for Warner Bros., 1959’s Rio Bravo. Though the stories are similar, El Dorado feels sharper, bolstered by Harold Rosson’s brilliant photography with scenes seemingly painted on celluloid.
  11. Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back
    Even 48 years after its release, and well into Dylan’s current phase of relative transparency, D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back retains something of a forbidden quality, a feeling that we shouldn’t be privy to the things it shows us.
  12. Chimes at Midnight
    Welles is at the height of his powers while reveling in the poetic force of Falstaff’s weakness.
  13. Persona
    Despite its elaborate meta-game-playing, which has had a pronounced and unquantifiable influence on film culture, Persona remains intensely alive and intimate.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    One Million Years B.C.
    One Million Years B.C. ends where the story of humanity begins: in a seemingly endless saga of strife and solidarity that resonates down to the present day.
  15. 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Django
    In a genre known for endless knock-offs, a trend that includes Django’s 30-plus sequels, Corbucci’s film is notable not only for the artistry of its construction, but also for the underlying anger that fuels its political agenda.
  17. Cul-de-sac
    Cul-de-Sac remains a searing reminder that Roman Polanski’s idiosyncratic grasp of the human mind was once evinced theatrically, rather than through narrative ferocity.
  18. Seconds
    A beautiful x-ray of middle-aged existential crisis, Seconds is arguably a second-tier John Frankenheimer funhouse of paranoia, but the same might be said of any film that isn’t The Manchurian Candidate.
  19. 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torn Curtain
    Torn Curtain, which was a commercial success because of the drawing power of its stars, is an artistic flop.
  21. The Endless Summer
    True to its title, The Endless Summer exudes a blissful, mellow buzz that could easily be misconstrued as lazy or innocuous filmmaking.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Naked Prey
    A purified chase film, Naked Prey nevertheless is at its most affecting in the childlike scenes between the main character and a young native girl (played by Bella Randles) he befriends along the way.
  23. Band of Outsiders
    More than lifting from and reconfiguring the artifacts of auteurist Hollywood, Band of Outsiders sees Godard parsing out his feelings for Karina, then his wife (they divorced soon after the film was completed), and meditating on the mercurial nature of his own preoccupations.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Ipcress File
    In the end, The Ipcress File abandons its more low-key, nuts-and-bolts depiction of spycraft, and as such morphs from the pure antithesis of a 007 romp into something far closer to a self-serious send-up.
    • 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.
  26. The Train
    The Train makes unmistakably clear to us that heroism isn’t always black and white—that sometimes it’s simply about doing what’s right even if you don’t understand why.
  27. The Americanization of Emily
    Though a bit overstuffed with long-winded speeches, Chayefsky’s scabrously funny script brims with snappy, crackling dialogue.
  28. Mary Poppins
    The “Whistle While You Work” residue of domestic slavery that colors “A Spoonful of Sugar” aside, Mary Poppins is basically Long Day’s Journey Into Matriarchy (cathartic for some, terrifying for others).
  29. 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harakiri
    Structured with intricacy and precision, the storyline alternates between present and past, using its extended flashback sequences to delay and then detonate narrative revelations like so many time bombs.
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