Movie reviews of Eric Hillis

Put your politics on hold for a couple of hours and Sorkin's pen and the talents of his impressive ensemble will do enough to occasionally fool you into thinking you're watching a great piece of drama. Review

You have to feel sympathy for the cast, who are largely impressive, particularly Jakeman, who really is giving it his all to create a sympathetic character, even if it's a character that doesn't make a lot of sense. Review

Scare Me suffers from major pacing issues, as it's too in love with its own words. Review

These are hardly original notions, and no amount of stylistic strokes can disguise the fact that Eternal Beauty has little to add to the cinematic conversation around mental illness. Review

The Antenna broadcasts its own crude message of how we should be wary of media, but it does so through a stultifyingly dull narrative that doesn't really hold up to any scrutiny... Review

The filmmaking is so intimate in parts that it makes us feel uncomfortable, as though we're intruding on someone's private affairs... Review

For all its trippiness and integration of temporal physics, The Dead Ones ultimately boils down to killing off its young cast one by one. Review

Danzig does at least attempt to give his movie the look of a comic book with primary coloured lighting, costumes and production design, but he displays little aptitude for directing, and certainly not for pacing. Review

Khaou takes a quiet and studied approach to filming this outwardly simple but thematically complicated story. Review

If I were cruel, I might describe The Man in the Hat as inconsequential. It does play like an easy listening version of a Terrence Malick movie, and it might be accused of being a free promo for the French tourist board. Review

The explanation also makes us question some of the events depicted earlier, such as why Malik and Kayla were being intimidated if the villains needed them to stick around. Review

The Devil All the Time has the journeyman look of prestige TV, with impatient editing that's always desperate to move on to the next chapter or awkwardly return to an earlier important detail. Review

The term 'elevated horror' is often bandied about by snobs who feel the need to justify their enjoyment of a horror movie, but the truth is horror is the most elevated, most cinematic genre of them all. Durkin gets this. Review

Bellamacina is herself a poet, and composed the many verses rendered in voiceover throughout the film, so I guess we're meant to believe Celeste is gifted, but it all just sounded like word salad to my ignorant ears. Review

Mulan is a visually vivid but thematically tedious retelling of the Chinese legend. Review

A British based Italian transplant, Biancheri combines both nation's cinematic legacies to give us a beautifully acted piece of social realist drama that's also very easy on the eye. Review

With Blinders, Savage takes a well-worn stalker storyline, adds some contemporary fears, gives us a three-dimensional protagonist and weaves a solid thriller of the sort we just don't see all that often anymore. Review

The New Mutants is the most boring kind of superhero movie, one where nobody wants to be a superhero and everyone spends the film moaning about the burden of their powers. Review

The documentary broaches various subjects - such as how the filmmakers initially fell in love with the genre, how it provides great roles for women etc - but it moves so quickly between each topic that nothing gets covered with any satisfying substance. Review

Nightmare Radio is a typical horror anthology, populated by some good, bad and ugly shorts. Review

But if you're willing to indulge Kaufman, his film will get under your skin. Review

Like the vacuous models that populate its story, Crystal Eyes looks fantastic but there's not a lot going on beneath its pretty exterior. Review

Coming in under 85 minutes with relentless pacing and a minimum of dialogue, Ravage doesn't reinvent the grindhouse wheel in the manner of Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, but it does give it a shiny new set of hubcaps. In... Review

She Dies Tomorrow seems like a novel idea, but it has its roots in films like Stanley Kramer's On the Beach and Don McKellar's Last Night, in which characters resign themselves to imminent destruction. The difference here is that while previous films have featured a very concrete threat, the vessel of death is left ambiguous here. Review