Clayton Dillard

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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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Sorcerer
    Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Madam Phung's Last Journey
    With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Li'l Quinquin
    It resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Bruno Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of Humanité.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea initiates a narrative that probes the fundamental gap between wanting to help and actually being able to do so.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    The Graduate
    Director Mike Nichols exploits rather than interrogates Ben’s anxieties, so that his ennui is reducible to his accomplishments, which keep getting repeated by the adults as badges of vicarious honor. Nichols also plays Ben’s socially awkward tics for laughs, whether Ben’s literally whimpering in Mrs. Robinson’s presence or in a cold sweat as he arranges what appears to be his first sexual encounter.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Nocturama
    Bertrand Bonello constructs a clear-eyed sense of how technology keeps getting closer and closer to replacing human consciousness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Hyenas
    Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 film resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    Tati biographer David Bellos called 1953’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday “Tati’s most perfect film,” and in many ways, it’s difficult to disagree with this sentiment in terms of tone and form.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    Dr. Strangelove is unique as an American studio film in that nearly every scene addresses its alignment of military action with sexual impotence and bodily excretion. It’s possibly the filthiest studio comedy ever made, even though there isn’t a single gross-out gag, curse word, or graphic image in its entire running time.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Clayton Dillard
    Sid and Nancy
    Sid & Nancy, in its first half, offers an immersive plunge into the punk lifestyle, capturing with wit and verve its anti-authoritarian sneer and DIY ethos, before then slowly circling the drain during a dour second half given over to disillusion and dissolution.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Things to Come
    The film is further confirmation of Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately devastating ear and touch as a filmmaker.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Summer 1993
    The film's screenplay is impressive for how crucial plot points emerge as backdrops to the explicit purpose of a scene.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty
    Med Hondo’s is a bravura spectacle of intellectual and cinematic daring.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Eastern Boys
    A ferocious plea for character salvation within a milieu where money and bodily affect are the raison d'être for human existence.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    A Room with a View
    A Room with a View is a masterful example of how to take well-regarded literary source material, render it in a manner that displays the visual markers of middlebrow sophistication, like ornamental costume design and fine-tuned “art direction,” as the Oscars like to call it, and intersperse it with surface-level controversies, like three heterosexual men chasing each other around a pond with their dicks out.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Rebels of the Neon God
    Tsai Ming-liang's debut makes one yearn for an alternative reality where it, not Pulp Fiction, became the beacon of '90s independent filmmaking.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    The Big Country
    Although The Best Years of Our Lives remains Wyler’s most essential assessment of the American psyche, The Big Country is stunning for how it meshes the intimate strife of a particularly white American stripe of self-resentment with the epic vista of Technirama Technicolor.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Babi Yar. Context
    Sergei Loznitsa continues to mine the archives for what amount to living documents of a past that, as is all too clear, reverberate into the present with devastating force.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Scarred Hearts
    Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Tales of the Grim Sleeper
    Broomfield isn't so much dedicated to journalistic truth or social ethnography as he is displaying bodies and mindsets of individuals that complicate any sense of Manichean polemics, where good and evil must be reckoned with at a purely secular and corporeal level, particularly along the lines of class and gender.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    The Watermelon Woman
    It's a film of such multitudinous interests and storytelling pursuits that its unfolding replicates the ecstasy of newfound romance.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Sullivan's Travels
    Preston Sturges jammed volumes of sociological concerns into a 90-minute satire with Sullivan’s Travels, Hollywood’s greatest comedy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Vengeance Is Mine
    Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Desert Hearts
    It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    Over 40 years after its release, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song still retains its shock value, but even more so, it remains distinct as a work that cannot be squarely placed within a singular category.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Heart of a Dog
    Laurie Anderson condenses contemporary, human experience to the point where exterior and interior are made indistinguishable from one another.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Breaker Morant
    A time-jumping narrative that’s rooted inside the linear temporal unfoldings of a pre-determined trial, Breaker Morant is like a conventional bloke in art—house clothing—but oh, what garb he has.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    I Am Not Your Negro
    The film makes no concessions about its dissatisfaction with the whole rotten lot of so-called western democracy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    The Asphalt Jungle
    Blood and trauma make an irresistible mix in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Faces Places
    Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Minamata Mandala
    The film understands how atrocity is perpetuated, fanning a maddening sense of injustice.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    A Skin So Soft
    The pleasure of Denis Côté's film radiates not so much from its storytelling as it does from the meditative force of its formal construction. Read our review.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Whose Streets?
    The film’s rhythmic editing contextualizes Ferguson’s streets for their relevance to a black populace’s want for stability and peace.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Prince
    It revives hope for a pop-art cinema that's capable of treating characters like actual human beings rather than pawns on a chess board.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    How to Have Sex
    How to Have Sex winds up delivering on the promise of its title, as this is a truly instructive film about sexual politics, though a remarkable one for largely leaving emotions unresolved and relationships feeling messy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Sworn Virgin
    Given its nearly episodic structure, formal choices, and similar thematic inquiries, Sworn Virgin suggests an unofficial remake of Vivre Sa Vie.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    While Roger Ebert’s screenplay contains overt jabs at Hollywood’s culture of exploitation, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cannot be called anything but sincere regarding its penchant for buxom female anatomy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Flamenco, Flamenco
    It's as if Carlos Saura were calling the bluff of spectacle-oriented narrative cinema that necessitates excusing its excesses with characters and plotting.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Daughters of the Dust
    This is a work of art that's as much a cinematic probe, and a challenge to mythologizing past eras, as it is an ancestral history lesson.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    No Home Movie
    By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    We Are the Best!
    Lukas Moodysson's film allows its trio of girls to express themselves through gender, certainly, but not undermine their desire to be heard as artists first.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    i hate myself :)
    Few documentarians give themselves to their work as literally as Joanna Arnow.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Starless Dreams
    Mehrdad Oskouei avoids sentimentalizing the girls or tritely lamenting their stolen innocence.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Director Brett Morgen distinguishes the biographical documentary by viewing himself as more of a curator than a film director.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Salt of the Earth
    It evolves into an intimate reverie on family and aesthetics, while remaining sporadically attuned to the reflexive and ethical dimensions of ethnographic discovery.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Way He Looks
    What progressively mounts tension is the film's understanding of a boy's gradually realized homosexuality as being inextricable from the central metaphor of compromised vision.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Born in Flames
    It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Black Mama White Mama
    Black Mama, White Mama became a key reference point for postmodern mash-up artists like Quentin Tarantino and Neveldine/Taylor, but the film’s socio-political jungle is not all fun-and-grindhouse games.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    'Round Midnight
    Jazz music is a state of mind in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ’Round Midnight.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Jamaica Inn
    Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn would have been better titled The Gangs of Jamaica Inn, since the film is thoroughly concerned with groupings, allegiances, and the ways class standing relates to moral obligation.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    The doc finds pathos in an amiable, fluid construction that chronologically charts the career (and political) ambitions of TV producer Norman Lear.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Two Trains Runnin'
    Sam Pollard's documentary teeters on reaching a higher plane of meaning simply through the efficiency of its information.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Great Museum
    The ghostliness of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna derives from an identity crisis, where digitization threatens to eradicate the gallery space.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    It highlights how the ownership of art serves as a marker of capital for distinguishing one institution over another.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Stations of the Cross
    Stations of the Cross acknowledges that putting theoretical behaviors and mindsets into practice can have unwieldy consequences if context and intent are wholly ignored.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Kékszakállú
    Like Shohei Imamura, Argentinian writer-director Gaston Solnicki can be understood as a cinematic "entomologist."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Rolling Papers
    It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    My Journey Through French Cinema
    Bertrand Tavernier's exquisite documentary consistently avoids mere hagiography by looking to the films themselves.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Young Ones
    It avoids the typical trappings of the genre pastiche by utilizing its clear indebtedness to numerous other films as merely a starting point, rather than an end.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Souleymane's Story
    Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Lovesong
    So Yong Kim's film ultimately manages a convincing articulation of friendship between women.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Offence
    Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Went Up the Hill
    Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Actress
    It convincingly reconciles private passion with public desire by suggesting that, for women in particular, the 21st-century limelight is always on, no matter the setting or venue.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Memphis
    The film's music is the city itself as well as a subtle suggestion that Tim Sutton's own digital cinema is just as elusive and intangible as Willis's unwavering sense of dissatisfaction.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Nasty Baby
    The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Mimosas
    Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The In-Laws
    The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Christmas, Again
    Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    When Marnie Was There
    The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Ikiru
    Ikiru wows for its complicated interrogation (and innovation) of subjective, cinematic experiences of time and memory, but lulls in its commemoration of a wealthy, privileged man who finally decides to care after it’s absolutely confirmed he has no time left to live.
    • 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.
    • 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?”
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Tarnished Angels
    Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Megadoc
    Mike Figgis’s anthem of aspiration and struggle leaves no doubt about Francis Ford Coppola’s beliefs.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Above and Below
    The documentary lingers on silences and reveals its subjects only through moments of quotidian behavior.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Afterimage
    Andrzej Wajda's film is a lean, unwavering look at the effects of artistic idealism in the face of fascist doctrine.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Disappearance of Shere Hite
    With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Strangler (1970)
    This 1970 psychological thriller was Paul Vecchiali’s self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Suburbia
    In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Ghost in the Shell
    The primary pleasure of the film resides in its awareness of the impossibilities of unity, whether physical or cultural, within a rapidly transforming global milieu.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Future Perfect
    The Future Perfect has the texture of a novella that keeps reworking the same idea in successively intricate ways.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Tu Dors Nicole
    Lafleur denies Nicole the angsty treatments given similar characters in films like The Graduate and Frances Ha by refusing to saturate the film with an undergirding sense of charm, where the issues being faced are merely points of spasmodic uncertainty that will erode over time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Mediterranea
    The film is unwaveringly attentive to problematizing the dividing line between predator and prey.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
    The documentary is an attempt to capture something of Akerman's infectious spirit and thirst for worldly experience, as both an artist and a human being.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    The Notebook
    János Szász's film is a thoroughly provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Democrats
    According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    On the Seventh Day brings a certain levity to wrenching matters of daily survival by thoroughly humanizing its characters, thus preventing them from feeling as if they're being written as stand-ins for thematic ideas.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Test
    Adept as both timely character study and epochal drama, Test wonderfully manages fully formed humanism without sentimentality.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    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.
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