A one-line spoiler-free review of everything I watched in the cinema in July 2024

I have never really been a movies person. They last too long and I always want the bar/toilet after 20 mins like at gigs, which stresses me out. But I got myself a BFI and a Picturehouse membership and as often as possible I try to find the weirdest most difficult ‘Martin’ thing to watch. But I have treated it like watching TV/gigs/football rather than sacred art. Boring? I will leave. Need a wee/drink? Do that. Occasionally you miss the vital two minutes of a movie but then so what? There is another one along soon. It has been fantastic. You can find all my one-line spoiler-free reviews here.

MaXXXine (2024), Ti West – From the trailer I was hoping this would be like watching a movie made from all the cut-scenes in a dayglo neon 80s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City revenge side mission, but it was much more dour than that and I did not last the distance.

Mia Goth in MaXXXine

Orlando, My Political Biography (2023), Paul B Preciado – I’ve never read Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: A Biography” or seen Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) so I am sure I lost some source text nuance along the way, but I found this fascinating and at times uplifting and at times depressing and at some points felt like “old man baffled by young people doing young people stuff” but it also had a couple of excellent dogs briefly in it, and you should watch it.

A clutch of Orlandos

Janet Planet (2023), Annie Baker – One of those movies where not a great deal happens, but everything that does happen is profound for the people involved. While not directly from the point of view of a child, lots of key moments are only seen via glimpsed but mostly unheard conversations, and some of the scenes are framed at child-height. A movie like this relies on the child actor being able to carry it, and Zoe Ziegler does, but it is Sophie Okonedo who steals every scene she is in.

Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler in Janet Planet

RoboCop (1987), Paul Verhoeven – Despite knowing this backwards by osmosis and the dialogue being heavily sampled one million times by industrial EBM bands, I had never actually seen this – I think it was an 18 in the UK at the time and I wouldn’t have been able to get in. Of course, as an emotionally brittle 52-year-old I found it really quite moving – it’s basically Frankenstein’s monster but facing the military-industrial complex ultra-capitalism of Reagan-era America rather than the mob with pitchforks, right? Depressingly, none of the satirical news interludes and ads would look out of place in a movie you made this year.

Peter Weller in RoboCop

Incidentally it set me down a rabbit-hole to listen to Heart of Darkness by Hoodlum Priest, a dark electronic British hip-hop/industrial body music 1990 album on ZTT which heavily sampled Dune, RoboCop, Blade Runner, Terminator etc. I assume at the time they didn’t clear the samples, and that is why it has always been hard to get hold of. It did seem to appear on streaming briefly a while ago, but has disappeared again. I guess it must be far too much effort to retrospectively clear them.

On another sad nostalgia note, RoboCop was my final visit to the Stratford PictureHouse cinema, which closed its doors on 28 July due to “increasing operational costs and declining admissions”. It had been in a death spiral for a while, with the upstairs bar and café shut and minimal staffing. A shame though, as it was a handy alternative to the Hackney and Finsbury Park ones.

Stratford Picturehouse

About Dry Grasses (2023), Nuri Bilge Ceylan – I bought a ticket to see this at the BFI on a Sunday evening before clocking that it has a runtime of three hours and seventeen minutes. Ha ha ha a movie longer than two football matches, no no nope not a chance, absolutely fuck that into the bin.

I Saw The TV Glow (2024), Jane Schoenbrun – God I really loved this. Made me nostalgic for a TV show and 90’s teenage years I didn’t actually have. Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine give phenomenal performances. So good I saw it on Monday and then went to see it again yesterday. Unprecedented for me to go to the cinema to see a movie more than once if it doesn’t have Sparks in it. I was left with thoughts to chew on for days, and always that dilemma, to now immerse myself in reviews and interviews about the making of it, to delve into theories of fandom and lore, or to just let the way it made me feel and understand the story live joyously untouched in my head.

Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in the brilliant I Saw the TV Glow

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