Cinema Year ‘25: April

Cloud / Sinners / The Day The Earth Blew Up / Bring Them Down

Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, our monthly round up of notable new releases.

With some notable exception, the slow-criticism process of our themed volumes means that we rarely cover contemporary film as it’s released. Which leaves our critics on the beat anxious to spill.

In this monthly supplement, we will share capsule reviews of notable new releases, and our writers’ discoveries. Today, we present new releases for April, with words by Kirsty Asher, Ben Flanagan, Esmé Holden, and Blaise Radley.

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Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024, Japan)

Something evasive and slippery is happening beneath the surface in Cloud, the latest film from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s prolific 2024 schedule to make its way over to British shores. And yet the set-up, at least, is pure ripped-from-the-headlines exploitation. Young factory worker Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) moonlights as an online reseller, scalping wares as wide-ranging as knock-off designer handbags and new age therapy machines. As his increasing absorption with the ticking-clocks and fast cash grabs of the scalping world distances Yoshii from old friends and lovers alike, so too does it draw closer more nefarious forces from across the dark web.

Framed in this fashion, Cloud could easily be replaced by any number of direct-to-streaming thrillers. And yet in Kurosawa’s hands, the material spins out of control discordantly, taking a tonal turn in its second half that raises all manner of questions about the more static, staid material that came before it. Without sharing details that are best experienced first-hand, it’s a shift that purposefully pushes viewers out of their immersion—characters who were once thoughtful and grounded suddenly speak in strange brash aphorism, fogs drift across the dappled half-light of liminal spaces, and, in keeping with Kurosawa’s oeuvre, violence repeatedly penetrates all manner of domestic sanctuaries. One to watch in the movie theatres, to put it lightly. BR

Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025, USA)

By the time Sinners reaches its bloodletting climax, you will have been drained. When director Ryan Coogler first introduces the Smoke-Stack twins (both played with careful virtuosity by Michael B. Jordan) he lays out a clear visual dichotomy that will come to both serve and damn him. Internally volatile Elijah (Smoke) wears a blue flat cap, while the charismatic schemer Elias (Stack) doffs a red suit. Though beautifully tailored by Ruth E. Carter, like everything in Sinners, the production is high-end, but signals nothing beyond its immediate meaning.

Smoke and Stack open a juke joint having ripped off Al Capone, one of many backstory threads that suggest a different film as Coogler spends a near hour building a rich tapestry of 1932 Mississippi. A meditation on the power of the blues and Robert Johnson myth gives way to musical sequences, a Rio Bravo (1959) hole up, sex without sensuality, narratives and counternarratives about slavery in the US, and British Colonialism in Ireland. It doesn’t land as a glorious mess, instead hemmed in by a soundtrack from the typically overbearing Ludwig Göransson, and by Cooger’s staid approach to his own material.

Scenes play out in middle-distance two-shots, more calibrated to streaming than the much touted IMAX 70mm. Coogler throws in a couple of polished oners, which will impress on the small screen just as they do in Adolescence (2025) and The Studio (2025). For a filmmaker described as Spielberg’s heir, it’s surprising how little invention Coogler shows when handed a blank check, and how obligatory the eventual Vampire showdown becomes.

“Dance with the devil, he’ll follow you home,” says Elijah, a B-movie line portending to prestige picture, needlessly varnished as with each sweeping shot of cotton fields. All of Coogler’s films are riddled with metaphor, with double entendre, and with ideology. But without a visual expression, the destiny they come most to worship is that of Hollywood capital. BF

The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (Peter Browngardt, 2024, USA)

Warner Brothers, at least under its current administration, seems to feel a lot of animosity towards its most iconic creation, which makes a certain amount of sense. The Looney Tunes cartoons had little reverence for anything that a major studio in 2025 would care about, whether it’s logic, narrative or any kind of authority. And so the Tunes’ first original animated theatrical feature, The Day The Earth Blew Up, only became so after its distribution rights were bought by the near unknown Ketchup Entertainment.

But it would be hard to say it has much of the rebellious flair of the Bob Clampett shorts it’s borrowing from (though it’s nice to see a dent in the ossified reign of Chuck Jones). For one, there’s a lot of plot. Scenes that Clampett would have heightened to breaking point—to reveal their fundamental brittle, cliché stupidity—are played straight here. It’s nice to see Daffy and Porky together again, but I could do without them having a classic third-act falling out. And any references to the fourth wall, like when Daffy pulls out a script to catch a now girl-bossified Petunia Pig up on what she’s missed, feel off-hand and superficial, rather than the core of the thing.

Maybe that’s an unreasonable expectation to put on such a marginal production, existing on the edges of studio wide regime change, and it does have its moments: the duo’s father figure, Farmer Jim, who gives them the kind of ratty, beaten up house that I’m paying £700 a month to live in in London is portrayed and animated as stiff and artificially as his narrative role. There’s not so much value in hoping for a backwards looking love letter, because, like a love letter, it will inevitably be insular and insufficient; reaching towards something it can’t quite grasp, trying to say something it can’t quite convey. EH

Bring Them Down (Christopher Andrews, 2024)

Like Jim Sheridan’s The Field (1990), Bring Them Down attests to the tensions that seep from ownership disputes and the upholding of tradition in rural Ireland. Where Richard Harris’s Bull McCabe in the former growls with guttural determination in the face of outside threats to his livelihood, Bring Them Down’s Michael (Christopher Abbott) works to keep his fury simmering just below the surface. This is neatly established in an opening scene where neither his face is seen nor his voice heard, his heightened emotion from the news of his parents’ divorce only evident in the alarmingly increasing speed of the car in which he drives his progressively more distressed mother and girlfriend Caroline (Grace Daly) to a point of irreversible tragedy. Moving to the present day, Michael maintains the family business of farming sheep to sustain himself and his disabled father (Colm Meaney) while Caroline has married his neighbour Gary (Paul Ready) with whom she has a son, Jack (Barry Keoghan).

What begins with a rammed down farm gate and a couple of stolen rams soon devolves into the violence that Michael has never been able to escape since the opening car journey. Told at first from Michael’s perspective, the film then returns to the beginning of the fallout from Jack’s perspective, allowing for both men’s calamities of secrets kept and truths untold to reflect on each other. It is suitably bleak, but beautifully filmed, with a particularly impressive section of audio and visual effects implemented in a scene involving an ear blown off by a shotgun.

It’s hard to decipher whether Barry Keoghan is miscast as Michael’s gormless adversary or whether he simply has the misfortune to look permanently sus, but he nevertheless utilises this demeanour during Michael’s narrative perspective to belie the real vulnerability and haplessness revealed in his own segment, especially at the film’s climax. But Abbott is the main draw here, driving his keenly intense style throughout. Bonus points for his impressive grasp of the Irish language - eat your heart out Richard Harris! KA