Aaron Hillis

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Premiere, Village Voice
For 194 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 9% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Aaron Hillis' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 Take Out
Lowest review score: 0 Unthinkable: An Airline Captain's Story
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 99 out of 194
  2. Mixed: 44 out of 194
  3. Negative: 51 out of 194
194 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Kung Fu Killer
    Director Teddy Chan's glossy thriller pays tribute to martial-arts cinema by casting enough Hong Kong industry legends to rival the cameo count of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It's a pity, then, that it's an undeniably bland film in style and story, despite a few elaborately staged fight sequences.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Hitch
    As the phrase turns, it's better when things come off WITHOUT a hitch.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Climates
    Technically, it rewards with nothing less than painterly cinematography and a seamless surge of organic soundscapes, but the story is entirely predicated on a weather metaphor so obvious that even an unplugged Doppler radar could detect it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    The Bourne Supremacy
    What’s missing here is the amnesiac hook that made "The Bourne Identity" such a sleeper hit.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    The Best Offer
    Vertigo this ain’t, but there’s some quasi-Gothic charm in the baroque premise and eccentric marginal details, including a mathematically gifted dwarf.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Kill Zone 2
    Dizzily entertaining when the knives, bullets, and feet are flying, and sometimes painfully melodramatic during the interim exposition.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Aaron Hillis
    The Film Critic
    Criticism mutated long ago, after the internet's floodgates opened, and that outmoded disconnect between The Film Critic and today's film critics underscores how the persistent references to cinema and film writing are self-awarely mimicking clichés but not subverting them.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Crazy Love
    Directed with little flair, a one-sided perspective and a questionable sense of moral responsibility by Dan Klores (his negligent lack of an editorial voice in the couple's lunacy reeks of train-wreck exploitation), Crazy Love is a disturbingly captivating tabloid horror, but that's not Klores' doing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    The Girl in the Book
    Cohn is clearly on the right track toward making the kind of nuanced grown-up dramas that sadly are no longer in vogue.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Flanders
    As a fan, it's upsetting to admit that Dumont's ideas and insights have narrowed with this picture, his relaxed pacing now lethargic, his physically and mentally thick characters too familiar, and his ice-water shocks a bit predictable. It would seem self-parodic if it weren't so damn tragic.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Canopy
    Despite Wilson’s early control and aesthetic confidence, there isn’t a single scripted idea of weight or emotionality that pays off.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Two Lives
    The film takes one entire act too long to shake its mopey fog and get crackling.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    The Devil Wears Prada
    So stupendously funny at times that she (Streep) nearly salvages the whole thing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Rigorous and outrageous, Greenaway's defiant approach to narrative only offers insight into his character, not Eisenstein's.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    The Dead Lands
    The film is undeniably elevated by its exotic milieu. It's a shame, then, that it's stuck with such a familiar coming-of-age call to adventure.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    I, Robot
    If you subtracted from the story and style components recycled from landmark sci-fi films of Hollywood past, you’d be left with Will Smith wisecracking over a box of unformatted floppies. I, Unimpressed.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Cesar's Last Fast
    Equally lionizing but richer in detail than the recent Michael Peña-led biopic César Chávez, this occasionally stirring doc portrait of the late Latino labor organizer and civil rights icon frames his legacy around a single act of protest.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Fever Pitch
    One-dimensional fluff piece.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Little Accidents
    All the secrets, lies, and consequences feel as authentic as the Appalachian milieu, but the film lacks the memorable idiosyncrasy of a River's Edge, or more fittingly, the myth-making lyricism of Matewan.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Jack of the Red Hearts
    It's rare that a drama shows such specificity with respect to the experience of coping with autism, and that sensitivity goes a long way.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Aaron Hillis
    Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    It’s all a curious humanist experiment with anecdotal surprises and whimsy, but its motives aren’t in sharp focus like Doyle’s hotshot imagery.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Aaron Hillis
    Remember
    Though it dodders engagingly at its antihero's pace, Remember is not subtle.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Nacho Libre
    When he runs out of material to tickle with, Black dips into his musically tenacious "deedle-diddle-dee" for some sure-fire ridiculousness.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Johnny English
    Favorably, Atkinson’s family-friendly, rubber-limbed professionalism can revitalize even the most vapid of material, which this certainly is. Anyone who has seen an episode of Black Adder can tell you that he’s leaps and bounds funnier than this sitcom-grade bauble.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    A Little Chaos
    Appropriately hunky but neutered of the brute sexuality he exhibited in Bullhead and Rust and Bone, Schoenaerts and his lack of bodice-busting tension with Winslet mirrors the film's transparent, often anachronistic inauthenticity.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Aaron Hillis
    Spare Parts
    This blatantly big-hearted product isn't half as vibrant as the original 2005 Wired article on which it's based, and myopically neglects to address Arizona's troubling anti-immigration legislation through even a splash of hindsight.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    The Ten
    The Ten has one foot in "Monty Python's Meaning of Life" and another in their "Life of Brian," but ultimately we get the David Letterman School of Comedy: mediocre jokes continually repeated until they sometimes become uncomfortably funny.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Aaron Hillis
    Jamie Marks Is Dead
    There are too many vaguely defined interpersonal dynamics and marginal characters (hi, Liv Tyler and Judy Greer!) that distract needlessly from the earnest tone of an outrageous set-up.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Aaron Hillis
    Thérèse
    If the banality of life within the Bordeaux gentry is the point, then the ensuing oppressiveness is immaculately depicted through precise performances and camerawork—just don't call it emotionally engaging drama.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Aaron Hillis
    Somewhere Slow
    Gilsig's transformation is quietly convincing, but the film itself is flatter and less cinematically gratifying than most television dramas.
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