Email Author Aaron Hillis

2008 Stories by Aaron Hillis

• Hoffman and Thompson Elevate the Otherwise Unremarkable Last Chance Harvey

  published December 24, 2008

  Can a heartwarming meet-cute as unambitious and overtly sentimental as Last Chance Harvey be simply too nice to get beat up on by anyone... More >>

• Rome & Jewel's Soapy, Contemporary Take On Shakespeare Not As Good As Baz Luhrmann's

  published November 26, 2008

  A dozen years before Baz Luhrmann shared his epic new recipe for Australian fondue, his Romeo + Juliet distilled the essence of... More >>

• Special's Sad Portrait of Delusion, For the Jackass Set

  published November 19, 2008

  That superhero triumphalism continues to dominate Hollywood is a peculiar trend in our pop-cultural history, but it makes the trickle down into... More >>

• The Films of Andrej Zdravic at Anthology

  published November 19, 2008

  With physical nature as his muse, Andrej Zdravic doesn't capture beauty in the mundane but in the microcosmic; for more than three decades, the... More >>

• War Child

  published November 12, 2008

  As we continue to bask in the rain of hopeflakes commanded by President-elect Obama, coincidental timing brings this doc about Emmanuel Jal,... More >>

• Otto; Or, Up With Dead People

  published November 5, 2008

  Headier in synopsis than in its vain execution, the latest transgressive art-porno from Canadian queercore auteur Bruce LaBruce (The... More >>

• My Name Is Bruce (Campbell)

  published October 29, 2008

  If your ears perk up at the mere mention of a fourth Evil Dead movie, or you tune in to Burn Notice just for co-star Bruce... More >>

• Animated Franco-Horror Anthology Fear(s) of the Dark is Hardly Child's Play

  published October 22, 2008

  While some may snicker at "graphic novel" as a term for comic books that take themselves too seriously, the French analogue—bande... More >>

• La León

  published October 8, 2008

  Within the Paraná Delta, a labyrinthine system of wetlands in northern Argentina, reed harvester Alvaro (Jorge Román) is, like... More >>

• Best of the New York Film Fest's Nagisa Oshima Tribute

  published October 1, 2008

  "Stop using the term 'New Wave' once and for all! Evaluate each film on its own merits!" protested a critic-turned-auteur from Kyoto named... More >>

• Shoot on Sight Humanizes and Oversimplifies the Muslim Experience

  published September 23, 2008

  Named for the London police's secretive "Operation Kratos" anti-terrorist tactics, which led to the wrongful killing of Brazilian national Jean... More >>

• Unspooled Shakily Documents Rich Film Students

  published September 23, 2008

  Had Bemoana, NYU film student Maurice Singer's 2003 thesis project (a bloody reimagining of "Little Red Riding Hood" as a domestic-abuse... More >>

• Wayne Wang's Immigrant-Experience Story A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

  published September 17, 2008

  As an escape from the Hollywood machine that hired him for products like Maid in Manhattan and Last Holiday, filmmaker Wayne Wang... More >>

• All of Us

  published September 17, 2008

  How effective are social-activist docs that don't entertain enough to captivate the non-converted? Brooklyn filmmaker Emily Abt's well-meaning,... More >>

• Fraulein

  published September 17, 2008

  Neither as explicit as Grbavica nor as veiled as The Secret Life of Words—two other dramas concerning the long-term... More >>

• Wayne Coyne's Christmas on Mars

  published September 10, 2008

  After their earliest decade as fuzzy-noise punks, Oklahoma City rockers the Flaming Lips found breakout success with their 1993 single, "She... More >>

• The House of Adam

  published September 3, 2008

  Suspecting that he's being robbed, the owner of a small-town diner asks his married son, Anthony (John Shaw), to return from college and spy on... More >>

• August Evening

  published September 3, 2008

  There are stories that depict how resilient family bonds are in times of duress, and those that reject such rosy ideals to show how tenuous... More >>

• Anthology Film Archives Revives the Public Mischief of Robert Downey Sr.

  published September 3, 2008

  Anarchically whimsical and countercultural with a capital C, the early underground comedies of Robert Downey Sr. (Putney Swope) will no... More >>

• Social Climbing Through Politically Turbulent Times in I Served the King of England

  published August 27, 2008

  Septuagenarian Czech filmmaker Jirí Menzel's sixth adaptation of work by his late pal, the novelist Bohumil Hrabal (their collaboration... More >>

• Two Films @ Two Boots

  published August 27, 2008

  Released simultaneously by ArtMattan—founders of the African Diaspora Film Festival, whose mission is to de-marginalize art depicting the... More >>

• Death Race

  published August 19, 2008

  It's not that 1975's Roger Corman–produced Death Race 2000 was so precious a grindhouse treasure that a remake seems... More >>

• Beautiful Losers, Aaron Rose's Celebratory Portrait of the Early-'90s L.E.S. Artists

  published August 5, 2008

  The ongoing trouble with docs about artists is that too few are very artfully made themselves, or else they flat out fail to demonstrate any... More >>

• Hell Ride: A Vulgar Homage to Cheapie Biker Movies

  published August 5, 2008

  In the post–Pulp Fiction '90s, one could throw a rock at random and hit a two-bit Quentin Tarantino knock-off—all chatty... More >>

• Late Bloomer, a Handicapped Taxi Driver

  published July 23, 2008

  "People who grin all the time, you never know what they're up to," says a friend of beer-guzzling, porn-watching, hardcore-show- attending,... More >>