I love going to the cinema. Yes, the screen is big and the sound system is powerful but that’s not the main reason that I go. I go to the cinema as a sort of affirmation about what movies mean to me. The best movies light me up, fill me with emotion, and leave me with images and thoughts that linger in my mind becoming waymarkers for how I map my world. I don’t watch movies, I experience them. For me, that experience has the intensity that some people achieve through prayer. The cinema is my church of film. I don’t go there to eat popcorn or drink Coke or chat to the people next to me, I go to open myself up to a film in the company of other people who want the same thing.
I’m fortunate to have found a cinema run by the Picturehouse group, people who think about films and cinemas as a community event. It’s a small local cinema in the centre of Bath that my wife and I can walk to in twenty minutes, called ‘The Little Theatre‘. It opened as a theatre in 1933 but it’s been a cinema continuously since 1939. It only has two screens, one of which was added in the 1980s by converting the upstairs rooms that were originally the changing area for the theatre. I don’t join many things but I have a Picturehouse membership because I know that they’ll show the kinds of films I want to see, including many films which weren’t originally made in English and offer the daytime screenings that we prefer.
We saw six films at the cinema in the first half of 2025. They don’t have much in common except that I’m glad that I’ve seen them. I’ve included the trailers to the films and my comments below. lms and my comments below.
Tornado (2025) directed by John Mclean
Tornado was an odd film. It felt like a mashup of a Western and a Samurai movie but was grimmer than either. Set in Scotland in the 1790s, it started with a young Japanese girl running frantically across open country. We don’t know who she’s running from or why she’s so desperate or who the boy running not quite with her is but already the film has a strong sense of fear and doom. Tornado starts in desperation and keeps getting grimmer. It was written and directed by John Maclean. It starred Kōki, Jack Lowden, Takehiro Hira and Tim Roth, all of whom did a great job. I loved that, although Tim Roth was the smallest man in his gang of marauders, he was absolutely the scariest. What sticks with me most was the camera work, which captured the bleakness of the landscape and the despair of the people.
Bridget Jones Mad About The Boy (2025) directed by Michael Morris
When I saw the first Bridget Jones in 2001, I could never have imagined that I’d be watching the fourth film in the franchise in 2025. It’s not that the first film wasn’t good, it was excellent. I laughed often and some of the scenes imprinted themselves on my memory. It’s just that it seemed so very much of its time and that time feels long gone. Yet Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy worked as well, if not better, than the original movie.
I suspect that some of that is due to the film being based firmly on Helen Fielding’s book (which I haven’t read – yet) and so isn’t trying to recapture the spirit of 2021 but is considering carefully, honestly but still with as much humour as pathos, what life is like more than twenty years later. Bridget didn’t get her happily ever after. She’s now a widow, a single mother and deeply in the grips of grief. A lot of what made this film wonderful was Renée Zellweger ‘s performance. It was nuanced, perfectly paced and astonishingly English.
Mr Burton (2025) directed by Marc Evans
Biopics are not my thing. They tend to be romanticised simplifications with a strong narrative thread that real life doesn’t have. I went to see Mr Burton for two reasons: because it had Toby Jones in a leading role. I love watching him work and I’ve yet to see him in a movie I didn’t enjoy; and because I remember being fascinated by the rich intensity of Richard Burton’s voice when I was a teenager.
It was an unusual story that was made into a powerful film by the chemistry between Toby Jones and Harry Lawtey.Lawtry evoked the Richard Burton I remembered in the scenes where he is playing Prince Hal at Stratford. He was also, despite being born and raised in Oxford, very convincing as a young Welsh-speaking boy from the valleys.
The Penguin Lessons (2024) directed by Peter Cattaneo
This is almost a biopic. Based on a memoir by Tom Michell, it tells the story of a disillusioned teacher who, while running away from his life by taking temporary jobs teaching English in posh schools in Latin America, has the misfortune to be in Argentina in 1976 during the violence of the coup d’état that overthrew Isabel Perón. His life, the movie advert claimed, was changed when he rescued a Penguin. I think his life was changed when he failed to rescue someone else.
The film was a little soft on politics and a little light on the violence of the day but Steve Coogan’s world-weary performance made it memorable.
The Ballad Of Wallis Island (2025) directed by James Griffiths
The Ballad Of Wallis Island is my favourite movie of the year so far. It’s a delightful, quietly uplifting, movie with an undertow of mourning for things and people lost. It has a small cast and a simple but powerful story. It was filmed in just eighteen days. To me, it felt fresh and intimate. All of the performances were good but Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan as the former folksinging duo and Tim Key as their megafan host were exceptional. I was even more impressed when I learned that Basden and Key wrote the script. If you only go to one movie on this list, go to this one.
Sinners (2025) directed by Brian Coogler
I almost didn’t go and see Sinners because the movie poster in the UK was so lame, I thought it was a sort of comedy horror version of Bad Boys.
The image on the left was the one I saw on British billboards. The image on the left was used in the US.
I eventually went to see Sinners because it kept getting rave reviews and it was on the cinema for weeks after its release. I’m glad I went. This is now one of my favourite vampire movies of all time. It’s beautifully shot, has a soundtrack that will make your feet tap and your spine tingle and performances so intense you can’t look away. I’d put my money on this being THE cult classic of 2025.
Mike Finn's Fiction 