Movie reviews of Eric Hillis

There's an important conversation that might have been started by The Whale, but Aronofsky's condescending approach will likely shut down any potential dialogue, which is a shame. Review

She is Love is a film that seems to be making up its story as it goes. None of its revelations are particularly interesting, just the sort of everyday issues that tend to break up relationships. Review

For all my complaints, I had fun with Plane. Review

It wouldn't take too much tinkering with the script to elevate The Lair above its Friday night six-pack and curry aspirations. That said, in an era when so few mainstream genre films are content to simply deliver a fun time, perhaps that's not such a bad ambition. Review

Skinamarink has become something of a cult sensation, and any curious fan of horror/arthouse cinema will want to try peering into its darkness. What you see in its shadows may depend on what you bring to it yourself. Let me know what colour you think this dress is. Review

Wright's film may be an unfocussed mess that can't decide what tone it's aiming for, but a sequel that's happy to eschew the knuckle-headed social commentary and simply deliver monster movie thrills wouldn't be unwelcome. Review

At two and a half hours, The Fabelmans is tough going, a lot like watching your rich neighbour's holiday footage if they had brought a professional cinematographer on holiday. Review

Lerman proves himself as capable of creating a suspenseful action sequence as any of his Hollywood peers. Review

Martone uses its geography, with its narrow streets and moped traffic to create the paranoid sense that trouble can emerge from any doorway or from around any corner at any time. Review

At little over an hour long, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra never quite allows us to get to know the various human characters that fall victim to the mattress, and as a result the melancholy Sye-young appears to be aiming for never quite hits home. Review

Endless Content Forever is a lot like a millennial screaming at their own generation to get off their lawn when they actually live in a fourth floor apartment. Review

Despite its experimental trappings, there's a clear narrative here, but by the end you might find yourself questioning whether a more conventionally dramatic approach might have done this examination of mental illness and familial trauma more justice. Review

Rather than creating a fictional heroine, we're left to wonder why the writer/director didn't focus his attention on memorialising one of the real life women who lost their lives at the hands of Hanaei. Review

The thrillers that have come from the Blumhouse stable usually stumble when they attempt social satire with a straight face (think of the awful Purge series, the embarrassingly bad Black Christmas remake and whatever Run Sweetheart Run was), but their best movies are those that employ satire (Happy Death Day, Freaky). M3GAN is an addition to the latter camp... Review

As a problematic character, Tár is entertainingly awful, but awfully entertaining. Review

In essence Vienne may have simply filmed her play, but by centering the face of Brooks she employs one of cinema's great advantages over the stage – the close-up. Watching Brooks wrestle with his grisly memories makes for a deeply uncomfortable 60 minutes, and Capdevielle is creepily convincing as someone who has engaged in the sort of acts that fuel TV's True Crime industry. Review

The glue that holds the film together is Armstrong's performance. There are scenes that she rescues from Cage's somnambulist performance by injecting an energy curiously absent from her older co-star's turn. Ultimately it's Armstrong's film, and without making it explicit, the young actress does enough to suggest that she knows it too. Review

It's atmospheric to a point but never quite as unsettling as it wants to be, and despite its lofty air it resorts to cattleprod jump scares at points, Jenkin boosting the volume for an effect that relies on primitive shock rather than well constructed scares. Review

Pereda has made a strikingly assured feature debut. Sequences are pieced together with the studied skill of a veteran rather than a debutant. Review

Through Hilary and Stephen's relationship we get two awful tropes – the white saviour and the magic negro, with each serving to rescue the other. Review

Dickinson does a remarkable job in creating a sense of time and place, and despite the cast speaking with British accents, the snow-covered sets and frosty windows convince us we're in the Russia of the 1800s. It's just a shame there isn't more for us to become emotionally invested in beyond awaiting an awful man's just deserts. Review

It doesn't really work as either a slasher or a whodunit, but there is fun to be had with Exploited if you approach it in the right frame of mind (ie very drunk or very stoned). Review

Elsewhere Chazelle fills his movie with reenactments of famous Old Hollywood anecdotes and reworkings of scenes from other movies. Some of the comic vignettes are in dire need of editing... Review

The dialogue is truly atrocious, with lines a six-year-old kid would be embarrassed to have come out of the mouths of toy soldiers in his back yard. Review