One-line spoiler-free movie reviews for June 2026

This month featuring: spooky basements, cursed wishes, alien conspiracy and plenty of John Waters and Divine (plus one of the queerest sci-fi cartoons in history).

Repo Man (1984), Alex Cox – Bar Trash at Beer Merchant’s Tap, Hackney Wick – I didn’t know anything about this except that Alex Cox was the Moviedrome guy, and so thanks to the time trumpet effect this was like watching a load of GTA cutscenes and was an absolute riot.

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.

Polyester (1981), John Waters – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – This is just such a funny movie and Divine is deliciously over-the-top in it, actually, scrub that, everybody is deliciously over the top in it, and it was being presented in the original scratch’n’sniff Odorama format, whereby you got to experience various indistinct but unpleasant smells at key moments.

[Picture caption: Token Homo explains how Odorama works]

Backrooms (2026), Kane Parsons – I took my kid to this and was worried my lack of knowledge of the internet lore behind it would be a hindrance but I thought it was superb – creepy, suspenseful, incredible production design (like Alice in Wonderland meets Willy Wonka except wrong), brilliant performances by the leads, and most importantly now I know what it is like for my arms to feel like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon after a clarky cat.

Erupcja (2025), Pete Ohs – I enjoyed the lo-fi aesthetic and the stridently bored voiceover guy doing the linking narrative, and also came away thinking god it must be exhausting to date someone like Charli XCX’s character in this.

Ghost in the Machine (2026), Valerie Veatch – Does anything make a man feel older than watching a documentary where events you lived through – say the dotcom bubble and Web 2.0 – are explained as if to a 12-year-old because presumably most of the audience will have no recollection of these ancient things? No, is the answer.

I’m not sure that I learnt anything new, just had my idea that the whole US tech/AI sector is a massive environmental disaster/clusterf*** confirmed, along with the crushing feeling that inevitably we are all trapped on the same planet with it.

[Picture caption: An AI-generated still from Ghost in the Machine]

Pink Flamingos (1972), John Waters – “Please, Babs, come in and give me some eggs”. God, this notoriously ends with that scene but along the way is just a riot of colour, fun and absolute filth.

There is a fantastic essay about the film here on You Remind Me of the Frame:

“Take the scene where Divine eats dog shit. Divine does something that is perhaps the epitome of bad taste but enjoys it, sort of. It’s a mixed enjoyment, which overlaps the terms good and bad. That also plays into the audience’s reaction, as they are watching something bad, but they can’t stop watching. The bad tastes good. This challenges a note Susan Sontag makes in her famous work on camp: that ‘the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves’. Walters’ film suggests that one sniffs the stink because one enjoys it, not to find out if one can endure it.”

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Dracula AD 1972 (1972), Alan Gibson – Bar Trash at Genesis Cinema, Bethnal Green – An oddity that manages to neither particularly work as a vampire film, nor work as the erotically-charged on-screen fuckfest it is clearly yearning to be. No bewbs, for a start.

Time and Water (2026), Sara Dosa – Lots of beautiful footage and archive gems in this, which was a treatise not just on how the climate crisis is affecting Iceland’s glaciers, but on family, memory and grief.

Disclosure Day (2026), Steven Spielberg – My kid wanted to go to see this based off the trailer and then gave it a 4/10. I enjoyed it much more than that, although it does have one of the most ludicrously improbable chase/escape scenes ever committed to celluloid.

Harold and Maude (1971), Hal Ashby – Bar Trash at Beer Merchant’s Tap, Hackney Wick – What a life-affirming joy this film is, laugh out loud with a poignant ending for the ages. A truly deserved cult classic.

Obsession (2025), Curry Barker – This was obviously going to have something of the monkey’s paw about it, the glee of which was aided by the fact that Michael Johnston’s main character was quite an annoying whiny dweeb whose predicament you didn’t feel that sorry for.

Lesbian Space Princess (2025), Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese – This was an animated scream with lots of genuine laugh out loud moments, off-colour jokes, and was very, very, very queer, although felt more like three pilot episodes of a TV show smooshed together than a movie experience.

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 The Wicker Man, Romería and watching 13 Ghosts with the recreated the ‘Ghost Watcher’ gimmick of its original theatrical run (pictured below).

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