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

Julie Zwijgt (Julie Keeps Quiet) (2024), Leonardo Van Dijl – I thought this did a great job of showing how if you are the victim of abuse you are then put in a position where if you don’t speak up, you are potentially complicit in further abuse carried out elsewhere and people are a bit annoyed about you not saying anything if they think they can see something is wrong, but if/when you do speak up, you are only going to be viewed by others through the prism of that abuse and it adds a load of tedious re-traumatising life admin to your schedule.

[Tessa Van den Broeck in Julie Keeps Quiet]

Also, on a meta point, I was struck that this film made being a young elite sport prodigy look like no fun at all, and that presumably some of the young actors you see in movies with similar-aged ensemble casts have also been on a similar gifted and talented relentless treadmill to get to the point to be in movies. Director Leonardo Van Dijl has been interviewed about how he specifically made a point for that not to be the case here.

Withnail & I (1987), Bruce Robinson – A chilled out wine-soaked evening watching this in the open air outside Walthamstow Town Hall, with a specially filmed little welcome from Paul McGann himself.

[The Eighth Doctor at Walthamstow Town Hall]

Slade in Flame (1975), Richard Loncraine – I didn’t really know anything about this except that the couple of people I know who are into Slade really claim they are massively under-rated and like them a lot. The film was full of laugh out loud moments, sometimes because of the sharpness of the writing, and sometimes because they had written things you absolutely 1,000% could not say today. A romp.

Riefenstahl (2024), Andres Veiel – I found this weirdly conflicted. For a documentary with the aim of exposing Leni Riefenstahl as an unrepentant Nazi, using material uncovered in her own archive, it spent an awful lot of time just parroting Nazi talking points and showing clips of her meticulously filmed Nazi propaganda.

Tall Tales: Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard (2025), Jonathan Zawada – Not really a movie, but a screening of the film that goes with the new Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard project. I find that for me Thom Yorke’s non-Radiohead stuff veers between the great (Atoms For Peace, most of The Smile) and “That sounds like a good song deliberately ruined by obtuse production”, and this album oscillates wildly between the two. It was nice to hear it all in one go for the first time with no distractions and with Zawada’s visuals as god intended though.

Rien que les heures (1926), Alberto Cavalcanti, Entr’acte (1924), René Clair and Ménilmontant (1926), Dimitri Kirsanoff – I went to this very hungover after live blogging Eurovision, and it was perfect. Three all slightly weird silent films with live piano accompanying them. I find myself watching movies like these in awe of the technical skills and the fact it still exists, but also mentally going “That horse? Dead now. Never knew it was in a movie. That cat? Dead now. Never knew it was in a movie” etc etc …

Also I struggled with the narrative for the third one, as I appear to have face-blindness for 1920s French women, because about halfway through I realised I couldn’t work out if it was a story about a love triangle, or a story about a woman imagining two completely different ways her life might pan out. I enjoyed it though.

[Live pictures of my expression trying to work out how many women are in this movie]

Ljósbrot (When the Light Breaks) (2024), Rúnar Rúnarsson – This looked like it was going to be really good, but I had noted ages ago I wanted to see it and then forgotten the subject matter, and so actually after about half-hour I had to duck out because I just did not need my bank holiday to end with a long contemplation of grief. Sorry Rúnar.

The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed – One of the joys of being late to cinema is sometimes your shift finishes early, you spot something is on locally, and think “Oh all I know about that is that it is a post-war spy/mystery thriller, is considered an amazing example of film noir, and is always on all-time lists”. HOLY FUCK WHAT AN AMAZING MOVIE. The story, the cinematography, I actually had a couple of jaw-drop moments 76 years later because I didn’t know how it unfolded. Absolute cinema etc etc

[Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten in The Third Man]

Doctor Who: Wish World and Doctor Who: The Reality War (2025), Alex Sanjiv Pillai – There were no press previews so I went to the cinema to watch it and it was fantastic to be in a packed room full of Whovians gasping and squealing at all the twists and turns.

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