Cinema Year '25: July

The Shrouds / Happy Gilmore 2 / Superman

Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, a monthly review supplement. July was all about late style, with new films from master auteurs, and a David Cronenberg joint too. Words by Ben Flanagan, Esmé Holden, and Blaise Radley.

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The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2025, Canada/France)

I keep speaking to people who haven't watched The Shrouds. Cinephiles to be precise. It looks a bit serious, they say. More of the same isn't it, they ask so rhetorically. What has happened to our society, where a maker like Cronenberg can still turn out bangers and be met with such ambivalence? Didn't we agree that Crimes of the Future (2022) was prophetic, enlightening? A conspiracy is afoot, and it’s as frightening as anything in The Shrouds.

Fear may or not be Cronenberg’s intended mode; what emerges is a straightforwardly beautiful excavation of grief. Clearly and freely inspired by the loss of Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn Zeifman, it follows Vincent Cassel as a businessman who invents ‘GraveTech’, a live, 3D model of a corpse projected onto a person’s grave. As he rolls the technology out to cemeteries, there’s interference. A.I… Russia… China? All roads lead to late style: that sheen over the screen which screams high aesthetic sophistry to some, and DTV to others. With a cast including Diane Krueger, Guy Pearce, and as some TikTokers pointed out, a notable amount of product placement, you can make your own mind up.

Lazy, John Wayne-lite crusaders against the tide in this year’s F1 and Happy Gilmore 2 highlight anxieties about an industry switch over to overly tech-produced and corporate-mandated pablum. The Shrouds, too, comes with a slick, star driven PR campaign. Not Cassel, as magnetic and alive with sensualism as he is, but the man whose hairdo he pinches here. Cronenberg accompanied the release with a round of self-effacing and almost parodic goofy interviews for a content-hungry cinephile audience who live for closet visits and top four roulette. In that way, the sinister bitmojis that permeate The Shrouds’ decoupage become a metaphor for a cinema which seems to revel in its own afterlife. For those of us who spend too long maintaining our meta avatars, it proffers a frightening wake up call. BF

Happy Gilmore 2 (Kyle Newacheck, 2025, USA)

At this point Adam Sandler doesn’t really seem concerned with how his movies will turn out. Not in the jaded way of a much earlier movie in his extended universe, the Norm McDonald starring Dirty Work (1998), which has a basic contempt for having to pull together a movie with scenes and a story, but in the easy-going, likeably lazy, no worries man kind of way that made Hubie Halloween (2020) a cozy classic.

A certain sect of the cinephile audience, of which I am very much a part, has grown comfortable and content with Sandler’s presence, especially since he moved to the little alcove of Netflix Originals. All the anger that was once directed towards, say, Jack and Jill (2011) has cooled as he’s drifted away from the centre of culture — his films no longer speak to broader tendencies, they exist in and of themselves. And, they have become increasingly like nothing else: high-budget, low-effort hang out movies designed mostly for the people making them to have a good time. A good time that, at their best, is a little infectious, where a majority of the laughs are off-screen and implied.

So it’s not really a big deal that, in this long-gap sequel to the formative Happy Gilmore (1996), Sandler can’t conjure the same working class jock resentment anymore (so much so that he has to offset that energy onto his four interchangeable idiot sons). In fact, this tiredness becomes the subject of the film’s melancholy first act. The titular Happy (Sandler) accidentally murders his wife (Julie Bowen) in a comedy golfing accident, but the emotions are played totally straight — many scenes feature a schlubby, late-middle aged, alcoholic Sandler (under the thin veil of his character) sitting in the hopeless darkness, looking out at nothing.

But Happy must inevitably get his groove back and set the movie on less interesting tracks. The comedy gets broader and more CGI-dipped and the narrative turns familiar: Happy, who was once a working class disruptor, must pick the club back up to defend golf from the corrupting new forces of social media superficiality and empty spectacle, as represented by Benny Safdie, who can never resist an opportunity to look like shit.

Though even when Sandler isn’t explicitly surrounded by death and despair, all the familiar, ever-ageing faces point increasingly towards it, especially when intercut with scenes from the first film, where they seem so much more vivid and so much less tired. At points, to drag everyone back to where they were thirty-some years ago, feels like a reunion between old friends that doesn’t quite turn out how they hoped; it isn’t the same anymore, it can’t be. But maybe it’s enough just to get the gang back together to have a lesser time reminiscing over better ones. EH

Superman (James Gunn, 2025, USA)

Few things in life are easier than dunking on superhero films, but, at this point, what pleasure is there in doing so? By design they’re lightweight, throwaway, and seemingly endless in supply—much like buzz balls or disposable vapes, they’re such a readily apparent sickness that it feels hackneyed to deride them. Even as the tide continues to turn against Marvel and DC alike, with box office prospects dwindling and audiences fidgeting in their seats, no dominant genre trend has risen to take their place. This, after all, is a year where the two most successful American films are a live action remake of an animated film for toddlers, and a quasi-interactive piece of performance art that asked provocative questions like, “What if cinema was more like panto?” and, “How loud can 100 teenagers yell ‘chicken jockey’?”

In that landscape, is it possible to care about another franchise reboot in James Gunn’s Superman? And does it even matter whether it’s good or not? Coming off the heels of Zack Snyder’s divisively dour depiction of Supes as a burdened, pouting messianic figure, for a certain sect of fans this Superman will be much more agreeably comics-accurate, drawing on his goofier Silver Age boy scout persona and playing out like a Saturday-morning cartoon (even starting in medias res as if we’re just back from a mid season break). Gunn is the kind of nerd who cares very much about things like Superman’s canonical code of ethics and the mechanics of Clark Kent keeping his alter ago secret, which is endearing in a certain fashion. But after decades of fans squawking about the “right” way to depict superheroes, as a casual observer it's hard not to feel a touch exhausted.

Admittedly, this fetishistic adherence to comics accuracy is a step-up from the Snyder era, whose fans only seemed to care about Superman’s power feats or the size of his Superwang, but this latest iteration also risks very little as a result—even in its much-touted parallels to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, a subplot which only gestures at subversive political sentiment. Gunn is clearly quite content to have simply made a coherent spandex-laden adventure yarn, with crowd-pleasing oners in the big action scenes and gags peppered in any time there’s a chance of yawning. What it desperately needs to take it from merely decent to good (or even just interesting) is a grounding context, a side effect of a perceived audience aversion to origin stories that results in many of the film’s emotional beats gliding by on our shared cultural understanding of Superman. We’re bored of origin stories, we’re told, and yet for some reason we have to keep making them. At least this one had a cute dog in it. BR