Clayton Dillard

Select another critic »
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 9.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Clayton Dillard's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 56
Highest review score: 100 The Graduate
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
view
per page
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Worst Ones
    Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    The Film Critic
    It perverts cinephilia by asserting that anyone who engages in criticism actually, deep down, wants to be a practicing artist.
    • 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.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    Dirty Weekend
    Even if the title is meant to be ironic, the latest from writer-director Neil LaBute is a frustratingly stilted vision of middle-aged repression unleashed.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Stage Fright
    Jerome Sable's debut feature couldn't be further from De Palma's delirious cinematic essays on vision and genre.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Vatican Tapes
    Like technological innovation itself, the film seems overwhelmed by the reach of all its techo-cultural parts.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    Autómata
    Much like a spate of recent summer blockbusters, there's a tiring sense that every single facet of the narrative has to be rendered with truculent solemnity.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Face of an Angel
    Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.
    • 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.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Shanghai
    Everything in Mikael Håfström's film is needlessly bloated to accommodate its status as an international, prestige production.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Perfect Guy
    It uses convention to its advantage through an intriguing play with casting choices and bizarrely effective allusions to film history.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Inner Demons
    There's a disingenuous offering of pathos to accompany the film's ridiculous and violent denouement.
    • 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Marguerite & Julien
    It finds its filmmaker completely lost between impulses to pay homage, play it safe, or offer something—anything—new.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Manny
    An informative, if largely deferent, biographical documentary that tritely explains the ascendancy of Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 0 Clayton Dillard
    7 Minutes
    Whether because of race, shame, shelter, or fright, 7 Minutes remains white in the face throughout.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    37
    There's a fundamental lack of dramatic exigency in writer-director Puk Grasten's storytelling.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    The House
    The House's limp comedic pieces are only sporadically enlivened by a game cast.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 0 Clayton Dillard
    Always Woodstock
    The filmmakers play Catherine's disgustingly narcissistic sense of entitlement as endemic to the supposedly girl-next-door charms befitting the film's thoroughly normative gender politics.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    Tasting Menu
    There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    Fifty Shades of Black
    An aimless, if sporadically clever, parody that tirelessly conceives of human sexuality as punchlines for its shortsighted cultural ribbings.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Rage
    Paco Cabezas's film is little more than a revenge relic pretending that the ethical treatise of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence never happened.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    The Letters
    A brain-dead slog whose bankrupt aesthetics ironically soil the very legacy it purports to aggrandize.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Dawn Patrol
    The opposite of enlightenment, the film hides its anxieties behind a mélange of third-rate grit and playful xenophobia.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    Unfreedom
    The film's troubled aesthetics are exacerbated by a screenplay that contains the trappings of amateur toil, including dialogue that harps on innocuous moments and trifling exposition.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Return to Sender
    The kind of wholly misconceived thriller that begs asking precisely what its filmmakers were seeking to accomplish.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Sacrifice
    The film's very design turns out to be a whimpered bark followed by a toothless bite.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Dirty Grandpa
    As in Judd Apatow's films, crassness is boasted as shamelessness, and calculated sentimentality is dressed up as empathy.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    The Lovers
    A shamelessly derivative and preposterous would-be blockbuster that goofily fashions itself as a sweeping romance, time-travel sci-fi tale, and gallant period piece all at once.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    Vice
    Vice takes the basic premise from 1973's Westworld and morphs it into an incoherent slog.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    Some Kind Of Beautiful
    A hodgepodge of horny-old-man clichés writ large, staged as a gleeful affirmation of its male lead's ego and entitlement.
    • 2 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    The film is an incoherent and aesthetically barren harangue masquerading as a revisionist history lesson.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    Naked Opera
    A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Songs from the North
    North Korean culture is lensed in part through a South Korean perspective, with the final chapter asking: “Is reunification possible?”
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Coast of Death
    It convincingly insists that the human figure is no more vital to the image than the rapidly shifting landscape it inhabits.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    A Year in Champagne
    The premise amounts to numerous raised glasses and classical music cues, but little of this schmoozing strikes a notable chord beyond the démodé back-patting engaged throughout.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    L.A. Slasher
    It inflates the meta conceit (already borderline overblown) of a pop-obsessed, sex-negative serial killer to excessive but trite proportions.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Welcome to this House
    If the documentary isn't quite dynamic in its revelations, it's considerably more so in its challengingly essayistic presentation.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’hoansi
    The film’s nagging representational problem stems from its reductive sense of place and portraiture of emotional displacement, which gradually phases out the possibility of thornier revelations.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    The Institute
    The Institute seems constantly on the verge of dipping into spoof, though of what exactly is difficult to say.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Island Funeral
    The film rolls political commentary into the template of a “lost highway” horror film by forgoing ironic distancing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Hyenas
    Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 film resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Slaughter High
    Despite the pretense of commentary, the film asks no underlying questions about the society that produces slasher films and revels in its narrative’s basic premise to numbing ends.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Expedition Content
    The issue of racism sits nestled under both this sequence and the field of anthropology as a whole, giving Expedition Content a nakedly ontological dimension that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    White Balls on Walls
    Sarah Vos creates a nearly mockumentary effect that neither fully lampoons nor endorses contemporary standards for the art world’s political correctness but lands at a decidedly more ambivalent point.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Minamata Mandala
    The film understands how atrocity is perpetuated, fanning a maddening sense of injustice.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty
    Med Hondo’s is a bravura spectacle of intellectual and cinematic daring.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    No Fear, No Die
    As with Claire Denis’s previous Chocolat, emphasis is placed both on how the French legacy of colonialism persists into the present, as well as how Black men are often filtered through the white imagination to ruinous ends.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Little, Big, and Far
    The film adopts a diaristic, epistolary form that flattens its emotional topography.
next
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »