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

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 from the last couple of years here.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), Kevin Altieri, Boyd Kirkland and Frank Paur – I very much enjoyed the recent back-to-basics 1940s-set Batman: Caped Crusader animation, which leans heavily into the aesthetic of the 1990s Batman cartoons, so it was great to see this get a run-out on the big screen. Such a brilliant end battle sequence.

Blur: Live at Wembley Stadium (2024), Toby L – I saw this gig at the time – or one of the nights of it at least – describing it as “a blast” and them as “always my favourite Britpop band of the Britpop years”. It took a while to warm to it on the big screen though. I may have had something in my eye by the time This Is A Low and Tender came on, but as a concert movie it is certainly no Eras tour or Stop Making Sense.

My actual view of Blur live at Wembley Stadium last year

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), Tim Burton – I didn’t even know this was on the production horizon, and when the trailer came on I was like “Why have they felt the need to make a sequel to this four hundred years later, that’s pointless, oh hang on, they’ve added Jenna Ortega as a sulky goth, here, take my money” but I should have heeded my first instinct. I lasted forty minutes and then left realising I really, really did not care what happened to any of these people, dead or alive.

King Kong (1933), Merian C Cooper & Ernest B Schoedsack – “Holy mackerel! What a show!” one of the leads says at one point, which could very well apply to the movie as a whole. If you can leave aside that is essentially one long series of classist, sexist, racist and colonising tropes, the ground-breaking visual effects work still looks phenomenal to me on the big screen, and this must have absolutely blown people’s minds at the time.

King Kong has some trouble with planes.

The Outcasts (1982), Robert Wynne-Simmons – Billed as a restored lost Irish folk horror tale, this was fascinating and deeply weird in places, with a slightly jarring final act and an ambiguity to the ending which made me want to re-watch it.

Starve Acre (2023), Daniel Kokotajlo – Thanks to endlessly watching fantasy franchise television, this ran the risk for me of being “Doctor Who and Galadriel in an exciting folk horror adventure” but the lovingly recreated bleakness of the 1970s soon absorbed me in this slow-burn misery of a story.

Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark in Starve Acre.

Went The Day Well (1942, projected at the BFI on nitrate), Alberto Cavalcanti – This was perfectly fine, despite my eternal general bafflement about people making films about the war, during the war, when they probably should have been fighting the war, but the main appeal was for me to see something projected from nitrate stock for the first time ever. Reading all about it in advance I expected some kind of transcendental experience, but rather like people trying to sell me gold-plated USB cables to improve my audio set up *whispers* I didn’t really notice the difference. Maybe I’m still not a movies person …

Went The Day Well

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