One-line spoiler-free movie reviews for February

This month featuring: existential parenting panic, analogue Welsh folk horror, rock-history revisionism and the worst movie ever made (with additional UFOs wobbling on visible strings and themed cocktails).

Rabbit Trap (2025), Bryn Chainey – Wow, I absolutely loved this. Creepy Welsh folklore tied into recorded sound and experimental music, Rosy McEwen and Dev Patel were superb in it. He would definitely make a great Doctor Who casting choice. I enjoyed Simon Abrams’ review too:

“Rabbit Trap will probably seem heavenly to weirdos who love to watch attractive-looking misfits smoke and trundle across the countryside while wearing sensible, but fetching clothing as they capture weird sounds on old analog equipment”.

Yes, precisely.

H is for Hawk (2025), Philippa Lowthorpe – Well, now I want a hawk, don’t I?

Is This Thing On? (2025), Bradley Cooper – I really did not enjoy this – the stuff about his getting to grips with being on the comedy circuit was interesting, but the divorce stuff was gratingly superficial and saccharine.

100 Nights of Hero (2025), Julia Jackman – This, on the other hand, was a stylistically alluring magical world of stories-within-stories that I would have happily watched for longer, with joyously knowing performances from the main cast. Plus not one – Richard E Grant – but two! – Varada Sethu – Doctor Who cameos for me.

Hard Rock Zombies (1984), Krishna Shah and Prince of Darkness (1987), John Carpenter – Bar Trash at Beer Merchant’s Tap, Hackney Wick

Where to start? Hard Rock Zombie has a plot driven by a guy lusting after a child and has zombie Hitler in it, while Prince of Darkness has some green goo that starts making people go creepy. A double bill of Satanic insanity.

Bar Trash, run by Token Homo, presents “Queer cult & curious cinema” in relaxed screenings with alcohol, a raffle, a quiz and lots of laughs – find out more at tokenhomo.com/bar-trash.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Céline Sciamma – Incredibly beautiful, with almost every frame a painting, but so glacial I left half an hour before the end and read what happened on Wikipedia instead.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958), Edward D Wood Jr – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – There has been some attempt to rehabilitate this movie from its reputation as the worst of all time, and those attempts are wrong. Astonishingly bad. I loved it. And Token Homo et al added flying saucers, explosive effects, and a fake Bela and Vampira terrorising the audience. Plus themed cocktails. What’s not to love? Apart from the movie.

Possession (1981), Andrzej Zulawski – Sam Neill becomes increasingly unhinged as Isabelle Adjani puts in the performance of a lifetime getting kookier and kookier as … well … STUFF happens. Genuinely the most baffling movie I’ve seen in years and I’d literally seen Plan 9 From Outer Space the day before.

Man on the Run (2025), Morgan Neville – The Beatles story has been told more than a million times so this was something refreshingly different, with lots of great behind-the-scenes amateur clips. History has been a lot kinder to Linda Eastman in retrospect than her reputation at the time, and this doco is understandably very sympathetic to her. Wings output was very much the curate’s egg though, eh?

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025), Baz Luhrmann – This was great to see at IMAX, and well put together. I enjoyed seeing the band in rehearsal before the Vegas shows, and it was interesting to see Elvis actually acting as his own musical director, when he often gets pigeonholed as a bit of a pawn of that prick Colonel Tom Parker. The late 60s/early 70s Elvis when it hits the heights is great stuff – Suspicious Minds, Polk Salad Annie, In The Ghetto etc – but there was a lot of cheese there too.

The Moment (2026), Aidan Zamiri – I wouldn’t say I was a Charli XCX fan but I find her cultural impact interesting, and this is quite the strange little curio, an almost The Office/Thick of It style mockumentary version of what her life as the girl behind brat summer might be like, shot through with occasional moments that look like the true situation. There is a very telling bit where she complains that when she was recording brat people just left her alone to get on with it, but now she is surrounded by people asking her to make thousands of decisions about things 24/7.

By the way, I found this poster in the Finsbury Park Picturehouse explaining the 15 age rating to Charli XCX fans adorable.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025), Mary Bronstein – Rose Byrne is a sensation in this, and nearly always in shot in close-up as she tries to hold it together as everything unravels around her and people are just absolutely fucking useless. I imagine it is quite a different movie to watch if you are 1) a mother 2) the kind of prick father who goes away for work and then is a nuisance on the phone while not actually helping with anything. I can make no further comment.

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972), Robert J Kaplan – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – I couldn’t say this wasn’t entertaining, but it was more like a series of vignettes of queer culture in early 1970s New York than a story, and occasionally veered slightly into feeling like a Benny Hill sketch. Holly Woodlawn was a sensation though, and we got cucumber-themed cocktails, so a good night was had.

Read more of my one-line spoiler-free reviews of everything I’ve watched in the cinema in the monthly archive. Last time out I wrote about Mercy, No Other Choice (pictured below) and It Was Just an Accident.

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