A one-line spoiler-free review of everything I watched in the cinema in April 2025

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.

Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution (2025), Peter Hoar – Technically this was in March, but under embargo I got to go to the premiere of this, as I was recapping it for the Guardian. Lovely retro-robots and rockets reminiscent of Tintin and Wallace/Gromit, and always looks $1m on the big screen with its budget these days. Given its theme about misogyny and coercive control, my one line summary for the website was “What if Doctor Who was like Adolescence?”

[Afterwards my main concern was that I appear to have gone out looking like I had let Baldrick cut my hair]

A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick – Despite as a teenager briefly considering spending the rest of my life dressed as Sigue Sigue Sputnik, I’d never actually seen this. Blame all those years when I thought all films were too long^[*] and felt the lack of beer, cigarettes and toilet breaks made going to the cinema feel like unfun exam conditions.

Upon finally seeing it, I got to go “he just said the thing” to all the phrases that counted … “the heaven seventeen”, “fuzzy warbles”, “moloko” etc … and also the casting, use of music, and production design is just absolutely exquisite. It’s really fucking horrible though, isn’t it?

A Minecraft Movie (2025), Jared Hess – I took my boy to see this on opening night at the IMAX so he could watch it without having already been exposed to 1,057 irate YouTube fandom reaction videos sucking the joy out of it. It was a competent if unremarkable Jumanji-lite set in the Minecraft universe, which now thanks to memes and moral panic will be immortalised as a threat to western civilisation (or at least cinema etiquette) as we know it.

Gothic (1986), Ken Russell – I absolutely hated it.

Tommy (1975), Ken Russell – I remember seeing this as a kid on the tellybox at an age where my dad had to explain what “Fiddle About” was about, what groupies were, what drug abuse was etc etc, which sounds like it must have been an exhausting evening of parenting for him, but the movie obviously stuck with me. I don’t think I’ve seen it since, although I did see The Who perform the album in full at the Royal Albert Hall in 2017. It is just the most astonishing visual assault isn’t it? Like watching a hyperactive fluorescent three minute pop video, but for one hour and fifty minutes.

[Roger Daltrey and disciples in Tommy]

(This was a lovely Token Homo screening at a bar in Hackney Wick)

The Stimming Pool (2024), Sam Ahern, Georgia Kumari Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Steven Eastwood, Robin Elliot-Knowles and Lucy Walker – I found this fascinating, and also the format is really interesting – it kind of doesn’t have a plot as such, but equally it isn’t exactly completely separate vignettes either.

[The creators of The Stimming Pool]

^[*] I still think all films are too long. And they are.

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