Clayton Dillard

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Slant Magazine
For 315 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 29% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 68% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Clayton Dillard's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 56
Highest review score: 100 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Lowest review score: 0 Nothing Bad Can Happen
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 157 out of 315
  2. Mixed: 59 out of 315
  3. Negative: 99 out of 315
315 movie reviews
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    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Little, Big, and Far
    The film adopts a diaristic, epistolary form that flattens its emotional topography.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Mutt
    That Feña suffers so that other trans people won’t have to may be edifying to some, but it also reduces Mutt to an Afterschool Special.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Two Tickets to Greece
    The film can never quite decide to what extent it wants to be either a light-hearted raunchy comedy or a darker comedic assessment of contemporary life.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Jane by Charlotte
    The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Burning Sea
    The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Desert Bride
    As two-handers go, the film has a moderately compelling pair of performances at its center, with Claudio Rissi’s take on a fun-loving road warrior providing an amusing, if obvious, counterpoint to Paulina García’s reserved homebody.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Gospel According to André
    While many documentaries about notable figures feel the unfortunate need to legitimate their subjects with hyperbolic praise from recognizable sources, the film immediately runs the gamut in a manner that would be worthy of a mockumentary were it not completely serious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Rat Film
    Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Gook
    Justin Chon fumbles the take on how his characters' anger fits into the greater landscape of a L.A. during the aftermath of the Rodney King beating.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Raising Bertie
    The documentary mistakes its access to quotidian behaviors as evidence of the need for comprehensive educational and financial reform.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Obit
    The film ascribes to a conventionally contrapuntal take on the lives of those who spend all day surrounded by death.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    A Woman, a Part
    The film’s depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Baden Baden
    The film plays like it's been methodically configured to snuff out an even marginal indulgence of its characters' emotions.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Newtown
    Its enervated address of both mental-health treatment and gun laws receives few constructive articulations beyond a single scene.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Miss Stevens
    It provides materials for discussion without directing the viewer toward a particular solution or easy answer.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Command and Control
    Robert Kenner's stylistic choices amplify the film's fetishistic fascination with the nuclear weaponry itself.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Fatima
    The film appears to have been devised to pander to the presumptions of Western, liberal viewers.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Will You Dance with Me?
    Derek Jarman's footage speaks to the freedoms afforded by the combination of a darkened dance floor and like-minded people.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Tenth Man
    As films about dopey dudes finding love go, The Tenth Man is too modest for its own good.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Wiener-Dog
    The film's back half nearly goes completely astray with two segments featuring unimaginative characterizations and tepid, mean-spirited scenarios.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Presenting Princess Shaw
    The peculiar circumstances of the documentary necessitate more transparency than the filmmaker is willing to offer.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Unlocking the Cage
    The problem here isn't necessarily the tension between emotion and rationality, but that the doc does little to explore these dimensions as they arise.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    The politics of the film are consistently muddled by director Rodrigo Plá's conspicuous formal choices.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Hockney
    After a nearly virtuoso opening, it reduces passages of the painter's life into multiple montages of pop pabulum.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream
    Michael Levine provides a history without a real sense of individuated struggle or even singular personage.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    It reduces its historical moment to a series of vignettes and voiceovers, each evincing a curiously tone-deaf sentimentality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    The film is more taken by its own formal composition than enunciating the musical edification promised by its title.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    A War
    Tobias Lindholm stages his claims through clunky dramaturgical scenarios, with the seams exposed at every turn.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Club
    Pablo Larraín's thematic interests shift toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Rabid Dogs
    There's no reason for Rabid Dogs to exist, as even character identity and motivation receives little attention.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    My Friend Victoria
    The film disappoints in its refusal to allow for deeper articulations of racism beyond, well, visible and verbal displays of racism.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
    The film forsakes all ambiguity regarding McQueen's psychology by stubbornly defining him as a determined, charismatic womanizer.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    The conclusion suggests the film exists to affirm the preconceived desires and perceptions of its makers.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Royal Road
    The cumulative effect is altogether perplexing, as it's difficult to tell if Olson's trying to upend clichés or settle for them.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
    For all of its evident toil in recreating historically accurate environments and researching the precise conditions in varying regions, it has little force as a work of cinema.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    A work of arduous assemblage that values information over affect and zip over conviction in its ramshackle historicizing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Zipper
    It wants for a keener vision of corrupted power, but at least Mora Stephens navigates her main character's sudden slew of infidelities without banalizing them.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    10 Cent Pistol
    One wishes the director had as burning of an interest in significance as he does trickery and quippery.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Do I Sound Gay?
    Another link in an increasingly tiresome chain of naval-gazing think pieces posing as personal documentary.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    What Happened, Miss Simone?
    It utilizes Maya Angelou's claim as tantalizing bait rather than the starting point for a feature-length thesis statement.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Overnight
    The film's Buñuelian potential for harpooning the bourgeoisie is quickly dashed in favor of mumblecore antics.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Wolfpack
    Crystal Moselle aims her cinematic arrow at the hearts of the same choir that Andrew Jarecki's stunted aesthetics preach to.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Love at First Fight
    Transparently wearing metaphors on its singed sleeves, the film shuttles around courses of meaning and significance without committing to any.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Intrepido: A Lonely Hero
    Gianni Amelio bogs down into a family drama that's neither supplementary to the film's initial quest or a fulfilling substitute.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Tangerines
    For all of the potential, historically specific revelations regarding nation and religion, Tangerines elects to become bathetic hokum.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Cupcakes
    Eytan Fox opts for a thoroughly hollow rumination on pop-culture mechanics as they pertain to young, aspiring professionals.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Futuro Beach
    It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The material being offered has been edited, composed, and made sentimental with the rigor of a political ad campaign.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Manny
    An informative, if largely deferent, biographical documentary that tritely explains the ascendancy of Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Point and Shoot
    In abandoning a more vigorous discussion of class and race-based senses of entitlement, Marshall Curry reveals his goals to be less critical or rigid than passively honorific.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    E-Team
    There's edifying information in the documentary, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Green Prince
    The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    War Story
    Mark Jackson's direction strips much of the agency from any character's grasp by insisting that their dilemmas can only be revealed with stone-faced austerity.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Very Good Girls
    Most disheartening is how the female leads aren't given ample space to develop as dynamic characters beyond the most urgent confines of the script's scenarios.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Marius
    Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    A Coffee In Berlin
    Jan Ole Gerster seems infatuated with his main character, but to little avail beyond reveling in his aimless despair.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Dance of Reality
    Alejandro Jodorowsky never manages to transcend the sense that he's indulging himself and participating in a hollow introspection unworthy of his prior cinema.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Félicité
    Alain Gomis never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts are meant to fit together.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Breathless
    Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

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