Clayton Dillard

Los Angeles

Writer at Slant Magazine

Lecturer in Cinema at San Francisco State University | Writer @Slant_Magazine

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Articles

Review: Robert Wise’s ‘The Andromeda Strain’ on Arrow Video 4K UHD Blu-ray

5 days ago | flipboard.com | Clayton Dillard

11 hours agoNEED TO KNOW Kathy Bates revealed she recently hired a personal stylist to "elevate" her look after her 100-lb. weight loss • The Matlock star also shared that her favorite form of exercise is walking — though she plans to start weight training too • Bates, 76, spoke to PEOPLE exclusively while at an event …
'The Andromeda Strain' 4K UHD Blu-ray: Arrow Video

5 days ago | slantmagazine.com | Clayton Dillard

Robert Wise’s adaptation of The Andromeda Strain retains much of the Michael Crichton novel’s emphasis on the minutiae of efforts to contain a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism while blending in elements of a procedural thriller and a disaster film. As lensed by Richard H.
'Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review

Jan 13, 2025 | slantmagazine.com | Odie Henderson |Clayton Dillard

With its fractured narrative, complete with a gimmicky spectral figure guiding us through the proceedings, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling is Richard Pryor’s All That Jazz. Playing like a greatest hits collection of Pryor’s stand-up routines, it begins with the titular character freebasing his way into a hospital burn unit, features him pulling a starter pistol on the mafia, and shows him destroying his wife’s car when she threatens to leave him.
'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Kino Lorber

Oct 21, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Clayton Dillard

Subjective trauma becomes subaltern desire in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene’s proto-horror silent classic that’s justly, if mostly, celebrated for its Expressionist, practically vertiginous images. By focusing almost exclusively on its pioneering formalism, the more historical and socially neutral readings of the film, aside from the work of scholars Alexander Doty and Harry Benshoff, have lost sight of its thoroughly embedded queer narrative.
'The Antichrist' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: Kino Cult

Sep 27, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Clayton Dillard

Alberto De Martino’s The Antichrist is easy to dismiss as a shameless rip-off of The Exorcist. But that would be to diminish the stylistic verve that De Martino brings to the project. In fact, aside from the more overt story elements relating to the occult, De Martino’s direction owes more to other Euro contemporaries like Walerian Borowczyk and Sergio Martino than to William Friedkin.
KL Studio Classics

Jul 31, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Clayton Dillard

The seed for In & Out, according to screenwriter Paul Rudnick, was planted during the 1994 Academy Awards when Tom Hanks, accepting the best actor Oscar for Philadelphia, thanked his high school drama teacher, who was gay. What if, Rudnick wondered, that teacher lived in a small Indiana town and wasn’t gay—or, more to the point, what if that teacher was gay and just didn’t realize it yet?
The Criterion Collection

Jul 28, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Clayton Dillard

Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine is an epic melodrama about the Peking Opera set against the backdrop of 50 years of 20th-century Chinese history. As structured by screenwriters Lu Wei and Lilian Lee, adapting the latter’s 1985 novel, the film unfolds through a series of chapters that stitch together a sense of how physical discipline, unrequited love, and art comingled with broader political and revolutionary movements in China from 1924 to 1977.
A History of Violence

Jul 15, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Clayton Dillard

In a 1990 issue of Essence, Isaach De Bankolé was heralded as “France’s new leading man,” largely due to his appearance in Jacques W.
Warner Home Video

Jul 3, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Eric Henderson |Clayton Dillard

The writer of Jurassic Park. The director of Speed. The star of Mad About You. The quaint Clinton-era notion that a major action blockbuster could be produced with, as the major antagonist, an atmospheric condition and not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East or France. Twister is so 1990s it hurts, but the pain isn’t as exquisite as revisiting a movie you once, for any number of pubescent reasons, loved as a child and now realize is a whirling roar of detritus.
The Criterion Collection

May 22, 2024 | slantmagazine.com | Clayton Dillard

In a September 12, 1997 piece for The Wall Street Journal titled “Gridiron Feminism,” Camille Paglia argued that not only is football “congruent with an enlightened feminism,” but that the sport “is one of the best educational tools for showing women how to advance in the ‘hostile workplace,’—which current sexual harassment regulations try to control through intrusive, after-the-fact legal remedies.” Karyn Kusama’s feature-length directorial debut, Girlfight, maps out a similar argument using...