A one-line spoiler-free review of everything I watched in the cinema in January 2025

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 here.

Nosferatu (2024), Robert Eggers – I am jealous of people who are of an age where this was their first big-budget vampire movie, because it looked great on the screen and Willem Dafoe was scenery-chewing brilliant in it when called upon, although it does lag a bit in the middle. I was slightly less jealous of being my age and watching a movie featuring the daughter of Vanessa Paradis who herself is now older than I ever remember Vanessa Paradis being.

[Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu]

Architecton (2024), Victor Kossakovsky – With a title that sounds like it could have been from the Christopher H Bidmead era of Doctor Who with stories like Meglos, Logopolis and Castrovalva etc, this was exquisitely shot, had incredible sound design, featured a really menacing and top-tier score from Evgueni Galperine, didn’t explain anything you were looking at, and was dull as fuck. I lasted 40 minutes.

[The star of Architecton, and frankly this picture is slightly more engaging than the film]

Babygirl (2024), Halina Reijn – I am just going to straight up say the quiet part out loud. Nicole Kidman in a kink-coded erotic thriller when both her and I are in our fifties? They could not take money off me faster. Some quite weird all-over-the-shop messaging in it by the end though.

[Harris Dickinson and Nicole Kidman in Babygirl]

Blackboard Jungle (1955) (on 35mm), Richard Brooks – It was on as part of the BFI’s Sidney Poitier season, and I particularly wanted to see this because in The Sparks Brothers documentary about my beloved Sparks, Ron says “I remember the first time I went to see Blackboard Jungle. One instance of hearing the title of music changed my whole DNA”. I didn’t really know much about it apart from its reputation for inspiring musicians and sparking riots. We didn’t rip the seats out at the NFT. I thought there was gonna be more rock’n’roll in it. The things we got trigger warnings about – racial abuse, sexual assault – are ten-a-penny today, but by far the most weird time-lurch for me was the way attitudes to miscarriage and childbirth were dealt with. 48 hours after giving birth: “Have you seen the baby?” “No”. Mental.

The Girl with the Needle (2024), Magnus von Horn – I found this absolutely spellbinding. With incredible and often close-up performances by Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm, I felt like I had something in my eye for most of the first act, and then the film just goes off into territory that is incredibly emotional and dark, but also with moments of “what the fuck did I just watch?”, and also moments of joy. An emotional rollercoaster. Plus it has an alpaca cameo in the background at one point, and who could argue with that?

[Vic Carmen Sonne in The Girl With The Needle]

Jailhouse Rock (1957), Richard Thorpe – I took my parents to see a screening of this at the NFT – my dad first saw it at the cinema when he was 13 – and it rips along at a decent pace with Elvis getting some very droll one-liners along the way.

The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), Robert Fuest – A beyond amazing technicolor gore romp. Loved it. A TokenHomo screening.

[Vincent Price and Terry-Thomas in The Abominable Dr Phibes]

Presence (2024), Steven Soderbergh – I really enjoyed the conceit of this movie, and some of the things that better reviewers than me have pointed out as weaknesses I felt hit some strong emotional beats if you have teenage kids right now …

[Callina Liang in Presence]

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