Movie reviews of Eric Hillis

There are brief glimpses of J.A. Bayona's brilliance to be found as he employs light and shadow to good effect and pulls off a 'how did they do that?' single take underwater sequence, but the script is a turd no filmmaker could successfully polish. Review

Lynch is a real find, but perhaps the most impressive performance comes from Roberts as his father, a financially successful but bitterly unhappy man who gives the impression that he knows something awful lies ahead for his son. Review

Less aping of Americana and more attention to the details of its cultural setting might have been advised. Review

Receiving a new film every year from a filmmaker as talented as Ozon may seem like a gift horse whose maw we shouldn't gaze into, but L'Amant Double is one project that could have benefitted from more time on the drawing board. Review

Freeman is superb, and his interactions with Andy's oblivious child are genuinely affecting. Cargo may lay on its metaphor a little too thickly in parts, but learning to let go of your previously unchallenged position of power and trust in someone who may not look like you is a lesson many a white man could learn from. Review

The entire movie has the same flat sheen throughout, and there's a distinct lack of energy in both the acting performances and the dull staging of action scenes, the latter of which are geographically confusing and nonsensical in their conveying of spatial relations. Review

I may have despised Deadpool, but I understood that it most definitely wasn't a movie for me. I'm not sure who Deadpool 2 is for, as it's trimming of its stock-in-trade anti-PC edginess will disappoint its core audience of arrested development males. Review

Wood and Stone commit themselves to their respective roles, and there are hints at the intriguing exploration of a relationship between two troubled souls that Allure might have been in more perceptive hands, but Wood's Laura is drawn far too broadly, and she's frankly so terrifying that it's simply impossible to believe Eva would fall for her in the first place, let alone give herself over completely to her disturbed older love... Review

With its loose structure of vignettes, Jeune Femme has the feel of a few episodes of a cancelled TV sitcom that have been sloppily edited together and released in movie form. Review

Florence and Edward clearly aren't a suitable couple, and on the evidence of this collaboration, neither are McEwan and Cooke. Review

What's most irritating about Mitchell's film is how it arrogantly expects us to embrace and root for its teenage male protagonist, simply because he's a bit misunderstood and dopey eyed. Review

There's really only enough material here to fill a 10 minute sketch, and ultimately LaBruce's film grows as tedious as the identity obsessives he's parodying. Review

Fargeat's camerawork and editing works to make us fear for their well being on an internal if not external level. Review

But for all of Roberts' good work behind the camera, there's still that lack of interesting characters to prevent Prey at Night from joining the ranks of the best horror movies of recent years. Slasher fans however should find enough thrills in Roberts' creative staging of sequences - along with his nods to genre staples like Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes and Christine - to get their money's worth. Review

Lean on Pete is very much a movie of two halves, one populated with engaging and intriguing characters, the other with a succession of crudely drawn, white trash stereotypes. Review

Arteta and Shawkat are credited as Duck Butter's screenwriters, but the film has an improvisational nature, particularly the intimate scenes between Naima and Sergio during their experiment. Review

Many of Obey's scenes feel like reenactments of those seen in better past dramas of young working class men, like Rocky or The Wanderers, but occasionally Jones' film finds its own feet... Review

For most of its running time, Beast deals in delicious ambiguity, but in its final 10 minutes it begins to provide answers to questions I would have preferred to leave the cinema still asking, and its climax feels transplanted from a more conventional but far less interesting thriller... Review

Tyler's likeable turn will make you wonder why we don't see her on screen more often, and Dourif delivers the sort of skin-crawling performance he's honed through years of practice, but Wildling adds little of note to either the 'wild child' sub-genre or the monster movie canon. Review

Bombshell does a good job of making Lamarr's scientific achievements accessible for a lay audience, breaking down complex concepts like frequency hopping through the use of graphics and animations. Review

Aside from its gender politics, it's odd to see Denis give us a film with such bland, privileged, middle class characters, given how she's been France's great chroniclers of the working class in the past with films like Beau travail and 35 Shots of Rum, a milieu that she seems far more comfortable in, and one I hope to see her return to following this unsatisfying digression. Review

With his suspect politics but undeniable presence, Johnson has established himself as the John Wayne of our times, and regardless of the quality of the material he's given to work with, he always delivers a fully committed performance with an infectious charisma that papers over a lot of cracks. Review

Truth or Dare has the bones of a compelling movie, but it adds too much fat and gristle with an overwritten, over-complicated script that quickly ties itself into knots trying to tell what should be a simple story. Review

The film's portrayal of Palestinians and Israelis is by contrast, decidedly one-note. Review