Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 1,406 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:
Almayer's Folly
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Angels Crest
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 631 out of 1406
  2. Mixed: 284 out of 1406
  3. Negative: 491 out of 1406
1,406 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.
  2. 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: 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.
  4. A Separation
    Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.
    • 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.
  6. 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]
  7. 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.
  8. Almayer's Folly
    Fervently passionate and formally meticulous, the latest stunning coup for a director who's made a career of repurposing archetypal storylines.
  9. 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.
    • 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: 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.
  13. 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.
  17. 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.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 88
    Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Brief Encounters is great entertainment.
  19. 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 88
    The Interrupters
    An inspirational and heartbreaking nail-biter, The Interrupters was more difficult for me to watch than any battle documentary I've seen in years.
  21. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    Benh Zeitlin's lived-in, almost abstract sense of social realism is partly what makes the film so refreshing and uniquely affecting.
  22. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    Order may be restored to the Circus, the "bad" elements weeded out, but in the jaundiced world the film has spent the last two hours so effectively delineating, the barriers between good and evil have been shown to be essentially meaningless.
  23. The Tree of Life
    The Tree of Life's fetching images are like glowing shards of glass, and together they form a grandiose mirror that reflects Malick's impassioned philosophical outlook. It's unquestionably this great filmmaker's most personal work, a revelation of how he came to be, why he creates, and where he feels he's going.
  24. Moonrise Kingdom
    Although the film remains continually fanciful, it always reminds us of the stakes in which precocious childhood rubs up against the possibility of a childhood denied altogether.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 88
    Oslo, August 31st
    The evocation of things ending suffuses the film with melancholy, as Anders increasingly becomes an observant rather than a participant in his own life.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 88
    Looper
    As in the very best Anthony Mann and John Ford westerns, Looper at once understands the visual power of violence and is deeply critical of it.
    • Metascore: 84
    • Critic Score 88
    The Descendants
    In a development that seemed to begin in earnest with "Sideways," a large part of The Descendents seems to operate on a non-narrative level.
  28. The Day He Arrives
    The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives.
    • Metascore: 83
    • Critic Score 100
    Leviathan
    Leviathan is a titanic achievement, a visceral overload whose impact registers immediately and with great force.
  30. El Velador
    El Velador doesn't pass judgment or manipulate emotionally, instead choosing simply to consider the arduousness of survival in a land wracked by slaughter.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 100
    In the Family
    An acutely felt, altogether devastating family drama as intimate and affecting as it is sprawling and untamed.
  32. Burn
    The endless scenes of burning buildings and macho posturing merely provide an action-driven context for the filmmakers to deal with more personal topics like loneliness and resiliency.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 88
    Le Havre
    For Carl Dreyer, to film a miracle took a single shot; for Bruno Dumont, a whole film. In Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki needs four shots to capture his - and what an ordinary event it is!
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 88
    Mysteries of Lisbon
    A marvelously elastic storyteller, a dry wit, and a Rivettean anti-determinist, the Chilean auteur Raúl Ruiz is fascinated by narratives that dilate from within, images seemingly full of secret passageways, and fabulists who collect tales like toys.
  35. Beginners
    One of the most distinct pleasures of Beginners is the way it puts together fragments of someone's life-presumably the filmmaker's, although little does it matter-with humility, and without vying for some complete whole.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 88
    Weekend
    A ticking stopwatch hangs over Weekend that amplifies the intensity of every conversation, every fight, every drink, every copulation. In other words, it's a device.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 88
    Skyfall
    Bond's latest is a remarkable high watermark for the series: at once solemn and deeply funny, sexy and sad, self-conscious without all the rib-bruising elbowing.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 100
    Consuming Spirits
    Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time.
  39. Tuesday, After Christmas
    At first glance, Tuesday, After Christmas seems, in both form and content, only a modestly ambitious endeavor. Yet the singular attention with which it carries out its aims-and the rigorous success it ultimately attains-is nonetheless unsparing, and bracing.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 88
    Upstream Color
    Upstream Color is lush, rhythmic, and deeply sensual, a film of exceptional beauty.
  41. The Turin Horse
    Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he (along with co-director Ágnes Hranitzky) dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 100
    Room 237
    The doc positions The Shining as a comparably coiled, thematically overflowing microcosm--standing in for cinema, for history, for obsession, for postmodern theory buckling under the film's heft.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 88
    Beyond the Hills
    It's Cristian Mungiu's staging and compositional skill that lends the material its true sense of dawning dread.
  44. Photographic Memory
    Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.
  45. The Law in These Parts
    A film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 100
    Tabu
    The pangs of romance, eroticism, anguish, and longing (both for the stolen moments of private passion and for the sense-making schematics of Empire) transcend any period of cinema Tabu may evoke.
  47. Augustine
    Alice Winocour's take on this true story carries the superficial trappings of a period drama, but its perspective is entirely contemporary.
  48. Las Acacias
    This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 88
    An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."
  50. El Sicario: Room 164
    A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.
  51. Rebirth
    If Rebirth's subjects are active guides documenting a fluid psychological landscape, Jim Whitaker constructs a specific cinematic geography around them with stunning time-lapse photography of Ground Zero.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 88
    Flight
    A unique, audacious studio movie, kicking off as a star-driven spectacle before whittling itself down to a raw and riveting character study.
  53. Love Exposure
    Japanese poet and cult filmmaker Shion Sono defines himself as an anti-establishment artist partly out of cynicism and partly thanks to his romantic concept of libertarianism.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 88
    Patience (After Sebald)
    A wide-ranging piece of literary criticism brought to vivid cinematic life, bursting with ideas and inspired visual translations of them.
  55. Sleepless Night
    After a few turns in the modest narrative, an unlikely sense of structural resilience begins to emerge.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 100
    House of Pleasures
    A brief history of time and space, according to Bertrand Bonello.
  57. Graceland
    The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.
  58. Tomboy
    Tomboy is one of those little big films whose simplicity and concision suggest the excess of meaning that language (cinematic or otherwise) could never account for.
  59. Into the Abyss
    Underlying the occasionally harrowing, consistently mournful tone is a philosophy that, more than being explicitly anti-capital punishment, puts both family ties and the social contract at the center of people's self-worth.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 88
    Dark Days
    The documentary enables its viewers to confront poverty on a human level by presenting its subjects, for the most part, like anyone else, living lives, despite their socioeconomic difference, relatable to our own.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 88
    Old Dog
    Minimalist in its aesthetics and soundtrack, quiet and deliberate in its plot, but nonetheless familiar--endearing and a vital addition to the small but growing Tibetan cinema.
  62. Attenberg
    A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late.
    • Metascore: 72
    • Critic Score 100
    Scarecrow
    Scarecrow embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon.
  64. The Mouth of the Wolf
    We experience the delay of the fantasy of the happy old couple in their country home in cinematic time as, for most of the film, the only body these lovers have is the spellbinding combination of visual fragments serving as apparitions to their voices.
  65. Bellflower
    Evan Glodell's debut has the sweetness of a lullaby reverie and the blazing ferocity of a monster-car nightmare, a first-comes-elation, then-comes-madness structure that resembles that of "Blue Valentine," another tale focused on the commencement, and then collapse, of an affair.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 88
    Robinson in Ruins
    Robinson's very name ties him to explorers like Crusoe and Walden, but he is also something like JLG's whispering leftist prankster who butted into 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her to intermittently spout rhetoric over images of freeways and construction sites.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 88
    Bestiaire
    Bestiaire argues persuasively without words, making a case without explicating one at all.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 88
    11 Flowers
    Because of its choice in subjectivity, and despite the film's historical context, 11 Flowers firmly elevates the experience of the personal over the political.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 88
    Beauty Is Embarrassing
    Neil Berkeley's documentary is as puckish as its subject, so steeped in artist Wayne White's creative juices that it makes you want to go straight home and start making things.
  70. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is pure pedagogic bliss.
  71. Portrait of Wally
    The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.
    • Metascore: 69
    • Critic Score 88
    In Another Country
    Hong Sang-soo hits the beach once again in his latest project, another austerely amusing study of hopeless neurotics making a mockery of leisure.
  73. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    The film captures Vreeland's perhaps unwitting philosophical integrity just as much as it drowns us in the exuberance of her work.
    • Metascore: 69
    • Critic Score 88
    Alps
    Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of "Dogtooth," it builds on that film's surreally terse style and notions of communication and identity without diluting its singularity or concentration.
  75. Meet the Fokkens
    Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's documentary is an unusual and welcome polemic.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Critic Score 88
    Girl Model
    The documentary makes you wonder about every beautiful woman who's ever stared out from a publication, poster, or billboard, looking sophisticated and self-assured.
  77. Sightseers
    This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.
  78. Farewell, My Queen
    Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Critic Score 88
    Damsels in Distress
    The clash of styles in Damsels in Distress is bewildering and then disarming.
  80. Outrage
    It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.
  81. Not Fade Away
    Triumphs when David Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories
  82. The We and the I
    A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.
  83. Unraveled
    Marc H. Simon's documentary has the thrust of a great American noir or black comedy.
  84. Bonsái
    Cristián Jiménez's film knows how entangled the will to know is with the will to make love.
  85. The Innkeepers
    Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.
  86. Jean Gentil
    Filmmakers Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas have crafted a beautiful tale of alienation, solitude, and existential anxiety.
    • Metascore: 64
    • Critic Score 88
    Domain
    The ultimate drama of Domain becomes how long he can be a witness to her self-destruction.
  88. The Nine Muses
    The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.
  89. Iron Man 3
    A madly creative, darkly comical, and fiendishly self-aware actioner with muscle to spare.
  90. Buffalo Girls
    Todd Kellstein doesn't allow you to entirely indulge convenient (though understandable and perhaps irresistible) armchair outrage.
  91. Polytechnique
    Though it's as schematic in construction as "Incendies," the film doesn't grind along to a ponderous plot; it's unnerving abstraction of its subject matter more daringly relays Villeneuve's view of the human cost of gender warfare.
  92. This Must Be the Place
    The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.
    • Metascore: 60
    • Critic Score 88
    Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    The exquisite live-action Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog may be the family film of the year.
    • Metascore: 59
    • Critic Score 88
    Silver Bullets
    Joe Swanberg's idea of making audiences "happy" is by acknowledging what his supporters and detractors have been saying about him for a number of years, but presenting these things within the same game of elliptical story-unraveling and confession that's governed most of his other films.
    • Metascore: 58
    • Critic Score 88
    Cosmopolis
    Diamond-hard and dazzlingly brilliant, David Cronenberg's film plays like a deeply perverse, darkly comic successor to Videodrome.
    • Metascore: 58
    • Critic Score 88
    Gayby
    While Jonathan Lisecki is well in tune with his film's niche market, his knack for comedy, both visual and verbal, is universally hilarious.
    • Metascore: 58
    • Critic Score 88
    Vanishing Waves
    A scintillating sci-fi throwback, Vanishing Waves draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, but without feeling plagiaristic.
  98. The Lords of Salem
    Rob Zombie understands horror as an aural-visual experience that should gnaw at the nerves, seep into the subconscious, and beget unshakeable nightmares.
  99. Vamps
    A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart.
    • Metascore: 56
    • Critic Score 88
    Miami Connection (1987)
    Love it or hate it, it's doubtful you'll ever forget it, and it may just force you to redefine your definition of what constitutes "good" cinema.
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