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 9.4 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
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    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Baskin
    The film mostly functions as a tour of familiar horror tropes for much of its running time.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    A Woman's Life
    The choice of low-grade, handheld digital images further reduces the film to the clichés of revisionist literary filmmaking.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Canners
    Canners plays a bit too infatuated with its subjects and for reasons not wholly clear by the film's end.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Madame Bovary
    Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Counting
    The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Lila & Eve
    Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Overnighters
    If it ultimately can't reconcile all that's presented in its too-brief runtime, that's largely because its situation, much like the dissonance between those involved, is comprehensibly irresolvable.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Knife
    The overriding suspense here is largely created by watching truth become negotiable, and through the small, plausible distortions of the truth that people come up with when survival instincts kick in.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    A Perfect Day
    The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    By Sidney Lumet
    Its strength lies in taking a thematic approach to Lumet's work, which prevents a chronological rattling off of one title after another.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Two Faces of January
    Superbly acted and sporadically intriguing thriller, yet it has a difficult time locating more stringent meaning and significance beyond its outward narrative of duplicitous actions and veiled motivations.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Apostate
    The Apostate finds humor in unusual images or situations, few resounding with lasting impact.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    It forays into satirical terrain in order to elide actual dealings with the problems at hand, so that each piece feels alternatively frivolous and weighty.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    The film is enlivened by an acute grasp of the impossibilities that abused Indonesian women face in a society predicated on their continued physical and emotional subjugation to men.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Witness
    The film presents Kitty Genovese's identity as an afterthought, turning her living days and nights into incidental details.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Argentina
    The film stagnates by restricting camera mobility and focusing more on capturing dimensions of the performances in close-up.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    A Space Program
    The film's larger purpose, be it about the ardor of handmade crafts or artist Tom Sachs's artistic ambitions, never emerges with any consistent focus.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Kills on Wheels
    Writer-director Attila Till is content to indulge a complication-free mix of bloodshed and pathos.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Sand Storm
    Elite Zexer weaves an impressively terse narrative of distinctly motivated characters, but the film’s core remains somewhat shapeless due to the routine dramatization.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Citizen
    It adheres too rigidly to news-cycle replications of barbaric governmental acts, and without putting them into greater perspective.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Manos Sucias
    Josef Kubota Wladyka is ultimately unable to reconcile complex dynamics any further than with a glimpse toward their fundamentally destructive effects.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Cielo
    Alison McAlpine's documentary lacks urgency beyond its persistent pondering of the sky's eternal mysteries.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Call Me Lucky
    Bobcat Goldthwait's hand too nervously tempers Crimmins's outré tactics as kooky showmanship bred from unimaginable trauma.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Half of a Yellow Sun
    It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Sembene!
    The film unfolds as a kind, politically soft offering of what lies beneath both Sembène's films and the man himself.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    Sex
    The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    The Other Side of Hope
    The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.
    • 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.
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