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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    • 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.
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