A one-line spoiler-free review of everything I watched in the cinema in December 2024

I’ve ditched the usual blurb about “not being a movies person, but anyway…” because since I started going to the cinema regularly in 2022 I’ve turned into the kind of guy who downloads the London Film Festival brochure and meticulously plans what to see. You can find all my one-line spoiler-free reviews here.

Gamera vs Gyaos (1967), Noriaki Yuasa and Shigeo Tanaka – Absolutely insane, and sometimes knowingly so. There’s a lovely bit of direction in the middle which you initially think is another model FX shot, but then the camera pulls back and it is just a kid playing with his toys. Contains plenty of hardcore man-in-rubber-monster-suit-on-man-in-rubber-monster-suit action. This screening was hosted by Token Homo, who I have written about before.

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls – I found this funny at different points to the rest of the audience I was watching it with, and wrote about it in more detail here. Was not convinced the play-within-a-play-within-a-game conceit was as profound as it seemed to think it was. It has made me start playing GTA V again though.

Die Theorie von Allem (The Universal Theory) (2023), Timm Kröger – An impeccably cinematographed homage to film noir which I found completely absorbing and incredibly and deeply moving about love and war and the choices we make during our lives, then I read a load of reviews from the public on Google complaining it was ambiguous and didn’t make linear sense which was kind of the whole damn point of the movie.

[Uncanny Ian Curtis doppelgänger Jan Bülow in Die Theorie von Allem]

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024), Kenji Kamiyama – This killed a couple of hours out with one of the kids during the Xmas holidays, and contains the life lesson that if somebody tells you to upgrade your horse ahead of a battle, you really ought to upgrade your horse.

All We Imagine As Light (2024), Payal Kapadia – I wasn’t fussed about going to see this, and then it was highly-placed in end of year lists (#4 from my Guardian colleagues and #1 in Sight and Sound), so I got FOMO and went, and … I’m still not fussed about it?

[Kani Kusruti in All We Imagine As Light]

My cinema adventures for 2025 begin today as I am off to see Nosferatu (2024) – absolute gothic catnip for me obviously – and I am booked in this month to see Architecton (2024), Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Jailhouse Rock (1957). I have also signed up for a screening of The Brutalist (2024), which appears to have a running time of about one million Earth years, and have my eyes on Babygirl, Maria, Presence, On Falling and Julie Keeps Quiet in the next couple of months. I shall no doubt write about them here. Happy new year!

Read more of my one-line spoiler-free reviews of everything I’ve watched in the cinema since 2022.