Movie reviews of Eric Hillis

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

Dunne's performance is palpably real and relatable, and she even integrates her self-consciousness regarding a birthmark under her left eye into her character's low self-esteem. Review

Tenet contains some of the most objectively impressive action set-pieces of modern mainstream cinema, but subjectively it's a bit of a bore. Review

If you can look past Baruchel's shoddy subtext-made-text, Random Acts of Violence offers enough thrills to keep genre fans engrossed. Review

Thankfully, Almereyda finds a way to turn Tesla's story into a cinematic delight by focussing not on the man himself but by finding a way to celebrate and integrate his achievements through a postmodern storytelling. Review

As with the social media it critiques, the best way to approach Spree is to view it as a trivial distraction. Don't take it too seriously and you might have some fun with it. Review

You have to applaud Savage for pulling this off, but it compares poorly to similar movies like Searching and the Unfriended series, which have managed to use the limited real estate of a laptop screen to tell stories that offer more than simply a series of spookhouse set-pieces. Review

So endearing are the central performances here, that if the movie took all four acting categories at the Oscars, it would be difficult to argue against such a sweep. Review

But much like the alien living inside Konstantin, Sputnik struggles to break free from its sci-fi influences to stand on its own feet. Review

While it provides some one-dimensional and one-sided laughs, Yes, God, Yes is ultimately little more than a secular sermon. Review

She's found joy in the sport she loves, and you'll find much joy in the sparkling delights of this thoroughly likeable movie. Review

There's a lesson here for low-budget filmmakers. Day 13 works best when it keeps things intimate, and for its opening 30 minutes or so it's a pretty effective little thriller, even if its protagonist's behaviour is hard to swallow. But it feels like a script that began with its final twist, and it ties itself in knots working backwards to deliver its denouement. Review

We get no real backstory of how Ahmed came to be this way. Review

Borte's filmmaking isn't exactly subtle, but it's economical and effective. Review