One-line spoiler-free movie reviews for May

This month featuring: the perfect folk horror, a Brazilian mistake, Stevie Wonder stealing John Lennon’s show and road-trip horror going off the rails (plus why the “big light” ruins David Lynch).

Power to the People: John & Yoko Live in NYC (2026), Simon Hilton – To be honest I didn’t have high expectations of this, and it is difficult not to want to say, come on mate, you were in the Beatles, why the hell are you playing washed-up pub boogie-woogie like It’s So Hard and Well Well Well? But Instant Karma and Cold Turkey are great, I *loved* the Yoko bits, and then Stevie Wonder’s vocals steal the show.

Hokum (2026), Damian McCarthy – This had a great set-up and some creepy moments but went increasingly off the rails for me.

The Wicker Man: Final Cut (1973 and 2013), Robin Hardy – It is just perfection, isn’t it? Every scene, every performance, the songs, the masks, the feral horniness, the ending.

Lost Highway (1997), David Lynch – I’d never seen this before, just remember the soundtrack making a stir at the time. I couldn’t say I didn’t enjoy it, but then equally I couldn’t really tell you what it was about. Couldn’t help feeling that all this unpleasantness could have been avoided if they’d just put the “big light” on in the house during the first section rather than constantly walking around in moody darkness.

Romería (2025), Carla Simón – Saying this was a gentle watch feels like I am damning it with faint praise, but I enjoyed it, even as it washed over me like the sea that made up so much of the imagery and location.

Enjoying these reviews? You can get them direct by email when I publish them. Sign up here.

The Early Bird Dood It! (1942), Tex Avery – We got treated to this at the lovely Kennington Cinema Museum, and I will never tire of those ridiculous Tex Avery / Fred Quimby slapstick sequences even if I was mostly introduced to them by Rolf Harris.

This was the bonus animated feature before…

Act of Violence (1948), Fred Zinnemann – A fairly straight ahead bit of American noir, with pleasingly great lighting but less pleasingly a little bit of moral ambiguity about it on whether snitching to Nazis during the war was bad, when I think it is a little more clear-cut than that.

13 Ghosts (1960), William Castle – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – This was an entertaining romp of a haunted house thriller, and for Bar Trash, Token Homo had recreated the “Ghost Watcher” gimmick of its original theatrical run. The movie uses blue and red filtering so you can choose whether to see the ghosts on screen, or to be squeamish and hide them. Great fun.

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.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026), Jon Favreau – An enjoyable enough kids’ Star Wars movie, basically one long action sequence after another, and lots and lots of scenes of a man in a suit punching CGI monsters. Kind of annoying that they always have to find a reason for the Mando to have his helmet taken off to make it worthwhile actually casting Pedro Pascal though. Grogu soooooooo cute.

Cabra Marcado Para Morrer or Man Marked For Death, Twenty Years Later (1964 and 1984), Eduardo Coutinho – This was an error. I hadn’t really understood what it was. I thought they had finished the movie twenty years later, not made a documentary about failing to finish the film two decades previously. Some of the interviews were interesting, but with little understanding of the contemporary politics in Brazil I didn’t last the full running time.

Passenger (2026), André Øvredal – This has a really taut tense first hour where it threatened to say something interesting about homelessness or mass road casualties and then just veered off into semi-religious formulaic nonsense.

Incidentally, I cannot get over that Jacob Scipio used to be the Kerwhizzitor in Kerwhizz (the quiz with added whizz).

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 But I’m A Cheerleader, L’Etranger (pictured below) and Mother Mary among others.

If you’d like these posts by email, without relying on whatever algorithms decide you should see, you can subscribe here.