Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 1,405 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 32% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 65% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 10.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 51
Highest review score:
House of Pleasures
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Cherkess
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 630 out of 1405
  2. Mixed: 284 out of 1405
  3. Negative: 491 out of 1405
1,405 movie reviews
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    • Metascore: 100
    • Critic Score 100
    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.
    • Metascore: 97
    • Critic Score 88
    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.
  3. 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.
    • Metascore: 95
    • Critic Score 75
    Zero Dark Thirty
    Doubtless, Kathryn Bigelow's greatest strengths emerge when she can more freely flex her muscles as an action filmmaker.
  5. A Separation
    Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.
  6. 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.
    • Metascore: 94
    • Critic Score 50
    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.
    • Metascore: 93
    • Critic Score 75
    Tristana (re-release)
    There are more than a few striking images and intriguing ideas to be extracted from Tristana. [10 Oct. 2012]
    • Metascore: 93
    • Critic Score 88
    Stories We Tell
    Sarah Polley is much more interested in the malleability of memory and the consequential refractions felt throughout her kin rather than telling a linear narrative.
  10. 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]
  11. The Act of Killing
    In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.
  12. Almayer's Folly
    Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.
    • Metascore: 92
    • Critic Score 75
    A Man Vanishes (1967)
    The earthiest of Japanese New Wave directors, Shohei Imamura goes fascinatingly meta in this 1967 hybrid of investigative tract and ruminative experiment.
    • Metascore: 91
    • Critic Score 63
    The Gatekeepers
    Even when the so-called Gatekeepers offer up damning testimony against their organization, there's no real threat that they'll ever be held accountable for it.
  15. Little Fugitive (re-release)
    The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.
  16. Cutie and the Boxer
    Funny, moving, honest, and occasionally inspiring, but as a portrait of a talent emerging from the shadow of a more public talent, the scale of the shadow is curiously omitted.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Critic Score 88
    This Is Not a Film
    In its way, this effort is both a forceful assertion of the most stifling brand of auteurism and a radical reconfiguration of its political potential.
    • Metascore: 90
    • Critic Score 88
    Blue Caprice
    The filmmakers are more interested in questioning what brings people to commit senseless and merciless acts than they are preoccupied with the historical record.
    • Metascore: 89
    • Critic Score 38
    The Artist
    The Artist neatly sidesteps this unsolvable dilemma by ignoring everything that's fascinating and memorable about the era, focusing instead on a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn't even qualify as a roman à clef.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 88
    How to Survive a Plague
    Presents a cast of characters who must continue fighting, for what's at stake is the very real, very imminent threat of their own deaths.
  21. Elena
    Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 88
    The Kid with a Bike
    If The Kid with a Bike is a fairy tale, it's the unsentimental kind that locates the dark enchantment in characters discovering themselves during their most despairing moments. Still, it's certainly the Dardennes' fleetest, warmest film to date.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 88
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn't just flattery, it's an indication of his method.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 100
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    The film's vision of masculine self-sufficiency is built around--and on, via Australia's own bloody colonial history--an elemental violence.
  25. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    Manages to be intimate and impersonal at the same time, a trait constantly reinforced by his portrayal of not only Ceausescu but the populace he led, represented, and controlled for nearly three decades.
  26. Moneyball
    True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 88
    Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Brief Encounters is great entertainment.
  28. Lincoln
    Steven Spielberg's film may further the heroism so associated with its subject, and favor a liberal viewpoint that leers down at the Confederates, but it's no bleeding-heart glamorization.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 75
    Barbara
    Most compelling in Christian Petzold's latest is the way the filmmaker adeptly conducts his tides of Cold War paranoia.
  30. Argo
    Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.
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