Movie reviews of Eric Hillis

Any potential for nerve-jangling suspense is squandered and in its place we get brief shocks, as villains appear out of nowhere. As Hitchcock was oft to say, a bomb suddenly exploding is nowhere near as effective as one ticking under a table. Review

Perhaps in a decade or so, Songbird will have some value as a shoddy document of what we all went through in 2020, something for teens who are currently too young to fully grasp what's occurring can look at and appreciate why Mommy and Daddy were so stressed out back then. Review

Up in space, the drama is just as inert. Sully and her crew, including her child's father, scientist Tom, are a poorly sketched lot. Review

Let Him Go is a gripping modern western anchored by one of the most textured screen couplings of recent mainstream cinema. Review

In place of muscular action, Knuckledust features a bloated ensemble of characters all suffering from verbal diarrhea. Review

Amid the cliches, it's the performances that make Falling worth sticking by. Review

Unfortunately this flatness is carried over to the film's scare scenes, and while Anything for Jackson is innovative in its premise, in its execution it's anything but. Review

But like the barely furnished, modernist home it plays out in, The Bloodhound is a film that could use an injection of warmth and life. Review

But simply critiquing the street level drug dealer without examining the wider context that puts kids in such danger is a little like giving a starving man a fish rather than teaching him how to fish for himself. Review

For all its genre tropes, Muscle is an earnest attempt to examine and question a very Northern European type of masculinity. Review

Murder Me, Monster gets by on its brooding visuals to a point, but eventually you realise that there's really very little going on beneath the surface here and it's essentially just a standard monster movie with a decidedly po-faced approach. Review

I'm no prude, but I just don't see the entertainment value in watching women being tortured in gruesome fashion with no sufficient story to anchor such portrayals of depravity. Review

After setting up an intriguing cat-and-mouse game between Frank and Cordelia, the film doesn't know what to do with this dynamic, and it descends into the sort of cliches you'll be familiar with if you've ever witnessed a TV soap opera play out a stalker plot-line. Review

A mildly satisfying curio for anyone with an interest in this period of American history. Review

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom falls very much into the category of "filmed play" rather than screen adaptation, too reliant on monologuing in its character development, too rigid with the source material to improvise on its theme. Still, when you have actors as powerful as Boseman and Davis on hand, that's not so bad. Review

With its widescreen picture and the telling lack of texture provided by modern digital video, it all comes across as an anachronistic skit, as though classic Hollywood is being parodied on a comedy sketch show. Review

It's testament to the effectiveness of both Mielants' storytelling and Janssens' sympathetic central performance that the novelty setting quickly becomes rudimentary... Review

Any positives of Blind are merely superficial. Review

It's a shame that Eun-kyoung can't exploit his premise as he opens his movie with a couple of effective sequence but ultimately he gets bogged down in a plot that fails to sufficiently grab our attention, and many viewers will likely check out early. Review

In this era of mechanical jump scares and CG, Kindred is a rare performance driven horror movie, and what performances! Review

Blood Vessel boasts enough elements to satisfy more forgiving horror fans, particularly those of us willing to accept some old school silliness. It is however possible for a horror movie to be both silly and scary, so it's a shame Blood Vessel never quite does enough to send any shivers down our spine. Review

About Endlessness might some day be uploaded by SETI as a document of the human race for any prospective alien visitors who stumble across our signal, as for better or worse, all of human life is captured in Andersson's work. Review

The Wolf of Snow Hollow is refreshing because it's happy to outwardly present us with a scenario we've seen multiple times before, but hooks us in with a unique protagonist. Review

His House works best as a straightforward refugee drama, not so much as a horror movie. Review