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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Point and Shoot
    In abandoning a more vigorous discussion of class and race-based senses of entitlement, Marshall Curry reveals his goals to be less critical or rigid than passively honorific.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    E-Team
    There's edifying information in the documentary, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    The Decent One
    The Decent One operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Inner Demons
    There's a disingenuous offering of pathos to accompany the film's ridiculous and violent denouement.
    • 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 12 Clayton Dillard
    Space Station 76
    As a space-opera lampoon, it's incoherent primarily because it's never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    The Green Prince
    The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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
    To Be Takei
    Jennifer M. Kroot plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei's prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Clayton Dillard
    We Are Mari Pepa
    The film finally works because of its multitudinous interests in adolescent shell-shock, where paralysis and uncertainty can only be momentarily assuaged through gendered outrage.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Rich Hill
    Rich Hill is poverty porn, examining lower-class spaces with pity as its operative mode and engendering little more than a means for viewers to leave the film acknowledging its sadness.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    War Story
    Mark Jackson's direction strips much of the agency from any character's grasp by insisting that their dilemmas can only be revealed with stone-faced austerity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Clayton Dillard
    Finding Fela!
    Alex Gibney uses archival and Broadway footage so seamlessly that telling the difference between reality and recreation becomes not only difficult, but one of the film's central metaphors.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 25 Clayton Dillard
    Fanny
    The characters, the sets, and the scenes all exist to propagate the notion that pleasure derives from repetition and remediation.
    • 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Clayton Dillard
    Marius
    Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 0 Clayton Dillard
    Nothing Bad Can Happen
    A film so comprehensively miscalculated in its desire to be a batshit think piece that it potentially creates a new category of offense.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Clayton Dillard
    Yves Saint Laurent
    For all of the supposed passion and anguish in Saint Laurent's clothing and relationships, Jalil Lespert consistently neglects to imbue the film with such a comparable level of ambition or desire.
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