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 9.3 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
view
per page
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Democrats
    According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    The Asphalt Jungle
    Blood and trauma make an irresistible mix in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Vengeance Is Mine
    Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    'Round Midnight
    Jazz music is a state of mind in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ’Round Midnight.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Starless Dreams
    Mehrdad Oskouei avoids sentimentalizing the girls or tritely lamenting their stolen innocence.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Clayton Dillard
    Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »