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. Under Capricorn
    Though Under Capricorn’s dark and twisty narrative eventually unearths everyone’s secrets, it’s the swooning camera that most fully taps into the class and sexual tensions that consume the characters.
    • 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.
  3. White Heat
    White Heat’s ultimate message: love’s a bitch…even crypto-incestuous love.
  4. Neptune's Daughter
    As if trying to put quotation marks around its disposability, 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter uses a perpetually underwhelmed narrator to undercut its central love story, surrounded by polo antics and swimwear fashionistas.
  5. The Set-Up
    Robert Wise’s The Set-Up isn’t noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan’s boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic.
  6. Force of Evil
    Garfield’s likably unlikable protagonist provides Force of Evil with a semblance of cohesiveness, even if the film often feels like the product of dueling fetishes and pet symbols.
  7. The Snake Pit
    As Virginia grapples with her inner demons, as well as a memory loss that leaves her disoriented and unsure of who she can trust, The Snake Pit periodically transcends its archaic psychological trappings to become an empathic examination of a woman battling both the internal and external forces that seek to fully erase her sense of self.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Rope
    A crime for most, a privilege for some is how Rupert classifies murder, but Hitchcock's eye-am-a-camera technique in Rope is after more than Nazi-superman residue still lurking after WWII.
    • 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.
  10. The Paradine Case
    This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.
  11. 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.
  12. Black Narcissus
    Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye.
  13. Nightmare Alley
    Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley viscerally understands the lurid appeal of carnivals and acts of illusion.
  14. Shoeshine
    Notwithstanding the veracity of the American-occupied urban locations he captures, De Sica doesn’t innovate or subvert expectations in the manner of the contemporaneous war trilogy of Roberto Rossellini, and his plotting with principal screenwriter Cesare Zavattini doesn’t rise above the level of a vivid potboiler with a mild bent for muckraking.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Odd Man Out
    Odd Man Out is indeed a character study wrapped in the guise of a sociopolitical thriller, and a work which accordingly plays better when accentuating the moral and personal complexities of the former through the aesthetic prism of the latter, shedding the weight of topical investment even as the shadows of its influence hang literally and figuratively on the film’s dramatic landscape.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    It's a Wonderful Life
    Without overlooking It’s a Wonderful Life‘s lapses into populist bathos, it’s necessary to rescue the Frank Capra film from its status as an untouchable American “classic.”
  17. The Best Years of Our Lives
    If The Best Years of Our Lives emerges as a more contemporary-seeing film than almost anything else to which its ingredients could compare, it’s because of how it wrestles with the burden of patriotism. The nation’s problems are right there in plain sight, just as clear as cinematographer Gregg Toland’s typically precise deep-focus shots.
  18. 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Stranger
    As distinctively Wellesian as Citizen Kane, and packing nearly as many technical wonders.
  20. Mildred Pierce
    Though its craft is accomplished, the film never gets deep under one’s skin the way it ought to.
  21. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Few other British films from that period seem to mythologize the pre-war period of Churchill's youth and early career quite as potently as Colonel Blimp.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Picture of Dorian Gray isn’t awful, though it’s certainly an instance in which an outright debacle would have made a much more interesting film.
  23. The Body Snatcher
    Even if the narrative threads aren’t as tightly focused on exploring a complex theme as one might hope, The Body Snatcher nevertheless manages to still send chills, and predominately through Wise’s fleet direction and Karloff’s unflinching embodiment of a real-world monster.
  24. 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.
    • 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.
  26. Gaslight
    Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lifeboat
    Lifeboat is actually much more complicated than it first appears. Its emphasis on moral debates in dialogue can seem a little dry, but Hitchcock’s shifting sympathies guarantee our guilty involvement with the characters until he builds to a climax of intellectual and spiritual excitation.
  28. Saludos Amigos
    Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade’s worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney’s manifest destiny to rewrite children’s dreams in the corporation’s own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record.
  29. Casablanca
    The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed.
    • 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.
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