Cinema Year '25: June

28 Years Later / The Phoenician Scheme / Shifty / The Triptych of Mondongo

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

In this monthly supplement, we share capsule reviews of new releases, and our writers’ discoveries. June was a true hit of Summer, with four mammoth blockbuster BBQs from four mammoth grill masters. Words by Blaise Radley, Kirsty Asher, Ben Flanagan, and Alonso Aguilar.

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025, UK/USA)

A couple of weeks ago I proclaimed (or rather, stated quietly into the Letterboxd void) that 28 Days Later (2002) was the first canon videogame movie of the 21st Century. Sure, there’s the obvious bridge from Alex Garland’s quick zombies (themselves inspired by the infamous fast dogs from the OG Resident Evil (1996)) to basically every modern action horror game, but there are a bevy of visual parallels with older games too, a blotchy 480p vision of hell whose strange camera perspectives would feel right at home on the PS1. 23 years later with Years, Boyle and Garland are back with a film that’s part-survival horror, part-open world crafting game, and part-Left 4 Dead (2008). There’s even a circa-2012 obsession with bows and arrows—the feedback loop runs on and on.

Set primarily on a small tidal island in Northumberland, where an island cult carves out a humble RETVRN existence, Years lacks the straightforward visual fidelity of modern AAA games, even as its A to B to A to C to A again plotting feels plucked straight from one. Shot on all manner of complex iPhone 15 rigs and drones and GoPros, Years has a style that feels archaic and fresh all at once, harkening back to the tight movements and jumbled immediacy of the Canon XL-1 camcorder used on Days. For want of a better word, Boyle goes nut-nut, cutting rapidly between haloed digital images and archive footage, and loading every sequence with unusual viewpoints and dutch angles. If it wasn’t so fast-paced it might have the same air as a bored gamer idly flicking the joystick till the camera gets stuck behind some lo-res shrubbery.

But it’s the evocative dreamlike stillness of FromSoft’s Soulsbourne games that sticks out as the most obvious visual reference point, particularly during a chase sequence with one of the new “alpha” zombies. The characters, half-lit by the stars above, charge across a shimmering sea, the water lapping at their shins as the northern lights dance across the sky behind them. It’s majestic in its otherworldly grandeur and yet still terrifying despite its abstraction; the type of moment that FromSoft have built their brand on, where the rest of time and space disappears to leave only you and whatever monolithic boss stands in your way. Sure, Boyle can’t help himself with some of his more juvenile Gen X visual affectations elsewhere—a ground’s-eye puke cam or a particularly smug shot of a St George’s Cross on fire, to name but two—but it’s still refreshing to see someone who made their career on nose-thumbing stylistic exercises double down on their impulses, albeit refreshed with new influences. And that’s without even getting into the Teletubbies x Savile ending… BR

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson, 2025 UK/USA)

Anderson's own scheme is to reboot the tried-and-tested formula every few years to delight, annoy or else jade filmgoers. For my own part, while experiencing some Wes fatigue prior to The French Dispatch I have settled into the comfortable reassurance of his dolly trundling back and forth like Wall-E—diligently putting in the good work to keep a dying industry alive with some spark of creativity and fun. For The Phoenician Scheme is undeniably a fun time, with Film Twitter making comparisons to Looney Tunes, although I personally saw a lot of Wes's own Fantastic Mr Fox in the charming elastic goofs and pratfalls.

As with many prior Andersons, a whimsically awful patriarch attempts to connect with his offspringand confront the imminence of mortality. Del Toro’s weaselly industrialist Zsa-Zsa Korda plays brilliantly off Mia Threapleton as his pious novice daughter Liesl, herself a worthy successor to Margot Tenenbaum as the irresistibly mawkish moll with a tempest of emotion brewing beneath the surface. Michael Cera appears to be quietly having the time of his life as the seemingly guileless Bjørn, and Richard Ayoade is simply rehashing Saboo from The Mighty Boosh as a stogie-chewing guerilla chief. The film works because the ensemble cast works. Whether it brings anything new to the table in how Anderson's work speaks to people in a direct emotional and social capacity is by-the-by, I would simply be happy for him to continue trundling that adorable dolly across the modern wasteland for as long as he likes. KA

Shifty (Adam Curtis, 2025, UK)

The first shot of Adam Curtis’ Shifty could be summative of his entire project. Jimmy Saville knocks on a large ornate door. After a moment, Margaret Thatcher answers it, and proceeds to greet a procession of children who Saville gleefully ushers in. ‘Nice to see you. Wonderful,’ She says, as Saville gives a black-eyed thumbs-up to the camera, and closes the door behind him.

It is plucked, as with all of the British essay filmmaker’s work, from the BBC archive. Across the 350-odd minutes that follow, Curtis uses these materials to take viewers through the Thatcher, Major, and early Blair years. If this sounds much like the version of Curtis de rigueur that we are familiar with, you may be less than compelled by the central thesis that the conditions of neoliberalism cause societies to get ‘shifty’, as the title says. As with his Russia-focussed TraumaZone (2022), Curtis has done away with the much-memed voice over and hauntological music choices (Burial, Nine Inch Nails etc). This results in a much stronger focus on the footage itself, which is often genuinely astounding.

From BTS of George Michael to working class communities in the North of England and Northern Ireland battling the indignities of their era, the fact that such extended and rigorously composed documents are available makes the project worthwhile alone. Curtis ironises it further, by showing how many of the moral panics could have been ripped from a 2025 Twitter feed. Blatantly surreal moments like a transgender dog and a sinister ventriloquist dummy all swirl into the tornado that was the latter-20th century. By letting the footage speak for itself as a testimony of British corruption, he doesn’t back himself into a rhetorical corner of an upbeat ending. Curtis has been Black-pilled. BF

The Triptych of Mondongo (Mariano Llinás, 2024, Argentina)

Mondongo I - El Equilibrista (Naturalism.)

The Tightrope in question seems to be the mere task of making this a Llinás film, in the auteurist sense, from what’s clearly an Artspace Commissioned Piece. Perhaps the most trollish act in Llinás post-La Flor career is making the first hour a straight-faced institutional doc, adhering to the mandate to the point of tedium, as if testing the projections of his audience to do all the heavy lifting for him, amidst a focus on material that lacks any of his usual structural playfulness. But by the end, when one is ready to bail out and cross his name as another casualty to White Cube pandering, Llinás lets the cat out of the bag, and recontextualizes what we’ve seen so far. An exercise that only serves as an introduction, and only so in a revisionist way, but simultaneously, feels integral to the whole Mondongo saga. The calm before the storm, when the tension of such a compromised project starts showing cracks by the end, before fully collapsing, going scorched earth and trying to build new pillars from the ashes.

Mondongo II - Retrato de Mondongo (Impressionism.)

The Portrait isn’t Mondongo’s at all. Llinás, the aloof mad genius of cinema narrative, paints the less complimentary of self-portraits, one composed of self-pity, embarrassment, and alienation. An achingly vulnerable work in progress, literally, where its erratic structure and flow are built in real time, in front of our eyes, as insecurities mount, YouTube clips come to the forefront, and Llinás becomes perhaps the first cinematic Letterboxd reply guy.

The artifice of cinema in raw form. Dirty laptop screens, megalomaniacal artists, and exalted affections, all eventually come together through the only grammar Llinás seems to understand: fiction. To him, that’s the be all and end all. In spite of his better judgement, towering over friendships, collaborations and even his own intent.

Fritz Lang regresará.

Mondongo III - Kunst der Farber (Expressionism.)

Symphonies. Color Theory. Feuillade. At the same time, on the same frame.

Reenactment. Fritz Lang cosplay. Johannes Itten read as Völkischer Beobachter. Ideas clash, barely coming together, like an ambitious film school video essay.

Juvenile. Dense. Moving. Somehow, against all odds, he got away with it. Cinephilia unfiltered. AA