Movie reviews of Eric Hillis

Unlike last year's Get Out, which made liberal white audiences laugh while also making them examine their own brand of bigotry, BlacKkKlansman is unlikely to make any white viewers leave the cinema questioning their prejudice, as its villains are unrelatable cartoon figures, and it ends on a scene that pushes the dubious idea that racist cops are a minority that the rest of the boys in blue are committed to flushing out. Review

Artigas might be the acting find of the year. Review

As dumb as a bag of cement, Skyscraper is nevertheless undeniably watchable, thanks chiefly to Johnson's presence and his unrivalled skill at acting against greenscreen backdrops. Review

The First Purge, which takes us back to the origins of Purge Night, is the very definition of a pointless prequel, one that gives fans of this franchise nothing they haven't seen already in the previous three films. Review

The performances of said amateurs vary in quality, and some come across as a little self-conscious, but this only serves to add to the almost docu-drama, travelogue realism of Granik's film. Review

In Sollima's hands, Sicario 2: Soldado is a scaled down sequel that ups the action quota and reduces the dialogue while still getting its anti-authoritarian message across. Review

In spite of its shallowness and superficial approach to taboo subjects like pedophilia and teen suicide, Flower is admittedly never dull, thanks largely to a performance from Deutch that demands you sit up and take notice of her talents. Review

While Ready Player One goes easy on its primary audience of pop culture obsessives, Sequence Break is far more scornful, like Rod Serling has come back from the grave to tell the young men of today to get a life, put the joypad down and call up that nice girl you like. Or as the film tells it, look between the ones and zeros. Review

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