Movie reviews of Eric Hillis

Coming in at 90 minutes, Stage Fright doesn't waste a second of screen time. Everything is set up within the first 15 minutes, including crucially the geography of its confined setting, and then the bloodshed begins. Review

But for all his technical virtuosity, it's for his work with his two debuting performers that Anderson should be most applauded. Review

Fuhrmann loses herself in this role as much as Alex loses herself in rowing. She's been around for well over a decade now, but has struggled to find good roles after her breakout in 2009's Orphan. Review

If it was its intimacy and relatively low stakes that made that first Holland outing work, No Way Home makes the mistake of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, filling the screen with so many characters that none of them get a chance to make any real impact. Review

Colman is thrilling here, embodying a character that will likely make a lot of women finally feel seen. Review

At over two hours, Benedetta can feel unwieldy in parts, but just when we might find ourselves beginning to drift away like a sleepy kid in church, Verhoeven throws another bit of madness on the screen to jolt us upright. Review

Along with the foreboding sense of doom, there's much in the way of black comedy, particularly when Petur naturally questions the life he finds his brother and sister-in-law living. Review

Reece is a prolific indie director who has been churning out low budget movies in recent times. Agnes is his most high profile release to date, and it will likely propel him to command bigger projects than he's so far been accustomed to. Review

The Power of the Dog is refreshing in that it gives us a brutally honest examination of how many gay men would have behaved in the early 20th century, transferring their shame and confusion into cruelty, attacking anyone they identify with in the hopes such a display of performative masculinity will cover their own tracks. Review

Pearce is bailed out to some degree by two things - the central performance of Ahmed, who does his best to humanise a wafer-thin character, and the landscape of the American South West, shot here with the fascination of a director making their first movie on American soil. Review

The Last Matinee is clearly a love letter to horror movies of the past, but it's penned with an unsteady hand. Review

But as the story drags on we find ourselves rolling up our well-tailored sleeves to check our designer watches and wishing a Paul Thomas Anderson, Martin Scorsese or Paolo Sorrentino had taken on this story of great potential. Review

While I never bought into Cassandra's predicament, the strength of Wizemann's direction and Saylor's performance kept me involved. Review

The Unforgivable has a card up its sleeve, but refusing to reveal its full hand until its dying moments turns out to be a misjudged play. Review

Mixing Shakespeare with folk horror and the Manson family sounds like a winning idea, but in Lapwing it results in an over-cooked stew that leaves a sour taste. Review

Ultimately this is the Clint Eastwood show, and your tolerance for Cry Macho's geriatric pacing and lack of high stakes drama will depend on how much you enjoy spending time in his company. Personally I can't think of too many faces I'd rather spend 105 minutes looking at. Review

With a little more work on honing the story, West might have created an eye-catching debut. What we get here is closer to an acting showreel for a promising young woman in Mix. Review

This lightness clashes with the title character's impending fate and his deep sense of regret. Yet somehow Hanks and the voice work of Landry-Jones combine to make this work. Review

He may be working within his comfort zone here, but Schrader's idea of comfort is still more disruptive than most American filmmakers working today, and of the Movie Brat generation filmmakers, he's arguably the one who's done the most interesting work in the past decade. Review

If there's little in the way of profound political insight on offer here, there are at least a couple of very entertaining performances from Marmaï and particularly Tedeschi, hilariously embodying the sort of angry woman destined to find her way onto the internet as the Karen of the day at some point. Review

Larrain's film keeps an open mind about its protagonist, but it's truly enamoured of the young woman she's portrayed by. Review

If Audiard occasionally fluffs his lines in a genre he seems ill-suited to here, visually he certainly keeps things interesting. With its bland and brutal architecture, the titular setting is an unconventional one for a romantic comedy, but Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume manage to find a beauty in the straight lines and sharp edges of the sort of tower blocks usually coded as dangerous in French cinema. Review

The Sanz twins deliver remarkable performances. Review

Sadly, such sequences are few and far between here, and whenever we're stuck in modern day London it's shot with the blandness of an episode of Hollyoaks, with writing to match. Review