A one-line spoiler-free review of everything I watched in the cinema in March 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.

Vampyres (1974), José Ramón Larraz – I had read a brief synopsis of this but didn’t realise the extent to which it was gonna be a full-on boobs-out shagfest which, despite attempting a lot of eroticism, genuinely featured the least sexy heterosexual sex scenes I have ever witnessed in the cinema. Overall an absolute hoot with some shockingly violent sections and then a somewhat bizarre final few minutes where it appeared they had run out of money/time/patience and just decided to wrap the whole thing up with two quick disjointed scenes and go home.

[From l-r: Sally Faulkner, Marianne Morris and Anulka in Vampyres]

[This was one of Token Homo’s relaxed Celluloid Jam screenings at Finsbury Park Picturehouse, which for this screening was a takeover by Category H Film Club, and a fundraiser for Bloody Good Period, a charity working against period poverty]

On Falling (2024), Laura Carreira – Very strong movie but incredibly bleak, and also does something that you rarely see on camera, which is essentially have the people on screen immersed in their own phones nearly all the time like they would be in the real-life version of this situation. Depressing viewing.

[Joana Santos in On Falling]

The Thinking Game (2024), Greg Kohs – A documentary about the DeepMind artificial intelligence company which contained some fascinating ideas and thoughts about AI’s consequences, but mostly felt like a propagandist pre-emptive hagiography of the company founder.

Opus (2025), Mark Anthony Green – This has got the return of a fictional faded superstar from the 80s/90s, journalists being dicks, John Malkovich doing a bit, is absolutely mad as fuck, and I loved it.

[Ayo Edibiri and John Malkovich in Opus]

Sister Midnight (2024), Karan Kandhari – I could write a whole A-level film studies essay about the same repeated framing of Radhika Apte as central to nearly every shot running through this movie like a stick of rock. Incredibly funny laugh out loud moments and it gets increasingly more baffling and “WTF did I just watch?” as it goes along to great effect.

[Radhika Apte in Sister Midnight]

Flow (2024), Gints Zilbalodis – I found this profoundly depressing, and also like a very long video game cut scene where I expected to suddenly take control of one of the animals and have to solve puzzles à la Tomb Raider. From a practical point of view, the film neglected to deal with 1) how the animals obtained fresh drinking water and 2) just how much dog poop there would have been on that boat.

The Devil Rides Out (1968), Terence Fisher – Sumptuous-looking Hammer horror with Christopher Lee in a rare “I am against the black magic” rather than “I am secretly doing the black magic” role, but I have to say my interest really tailed off before the end as it rather predictably plodded along and went a bit all “Jesus saves! Yay!”

And bless him, it was also quite hard not to keep going “Fucking hell, it’s Jerry Leadbetter!” or “Fucking hell, it’s Jim Hacker!” every time a youthful Paul Eddington was on the screen.

The End (2024), Joshua Oppenheimer – This has got a rating of 2.8/10 on the Picturehouse website, but I figured that any project that Tilda Swinton had wanted to get involved in was worth a watch, and it was, even if it was verrrrrrrry long, sometimes startlingly on-the-nose, and the production choice to make it a show-tunes musical rather than the tense and menacing thriller it could have been was, frankly, off the wall.

[Tilda Swinton in The End]

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