Cinema Year '25: May

Bogancloch / Bury Us in a Lone Desert / Slugs / Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

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. Today, we present new releases for May, with words by Blaise Radley, Tom de Lancy Green, Kirsty Asher, and Ben Flanagan.

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Bogancloch (Ben Rivers, 2024, UK)

I first saw Ben Rivers’ documentary Two Years at Sea (2011) at the BFI as part of a short stretch of programming overseen by the British Patron Saint of Hand-Processed film, Mark Jenkin (two filmmakers whose names may or may not end in an ‘S’). The film itself was playful in its rejection of narrative impetus; case in point, a scene in which the documentary’s subject, man-of-the-wilderness Jake Williams, drifts across the screen for ten minutes on a makeshift raft, finally exiting the frame only to suddenly start drifting back across the other way, quickly stifling the rippling sighs of relief.

Bogancloch sees Rivers returning to rural Scotland a decade later, once again documenting the life Williams has constructed off the grid for more than 30 years. The dialogue is limited (Williams more often sings than talks), mundane moments of daily routine are left to sit on screen for minutes at a time, and the 16mm black-and-white photography frequently dissolves its subject into the natural world around him—and yet, through it all, Williams radiates a warm humanism that feels at odds with his decision to cut himself off from traditional society. As Rivers, in attendance, observes afterwards: “He’s not a misanthrope, he really likes people… he welcomes anybody.” It’s an interesting contradiction, one that Rivers pulls at the edges of with his staging and restaging of events.

Watching Bogancloch, it’s hard not to remember the audience member at the BFI screening of Two Years at Sea who, during a typically erudite Q&A, explained in detail the dream they had having slept through the majority of the film (Rivers, for his part, politely declined the notion that this was his intent). At several key junctures in Bogancloch, Williams himself falls asleep just before the next scene unfolds; one time he finds himself teaching a science class with an improvised planetarium made out of an old pub umbrella; another time he joins a choir around a campfire to sing old folks songs. Whether these sequences are imagined or not is hard to gauge—but the emotional reality shines through. If Two Years at Sea was defined by a quiet loneliness, Bogancloch is looser and freer: a film about connections that reach beyond convention. All that and an extended shot of a man taking a bath. Cinema. BR

Bury Us in a Lone Desert (Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc, 2025, Vietnam)

Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc does dollies more gracefully than anyone I’ve seen using a consumer-grade camera for a while. His pushes in and outwards are slow and meditative, but pointed, lending a gamesmanship to an early scene where a burglar, subdued and trussed by his elderly target, is asked to perform the unthinkable: kill the old man and bury him (in a lone desert!) with a plaster-cast replica of his dead wife. Despite the pokiness of the old man’s apartment, typical of thousands of urban tower blocks in Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City, Phúc has a knack for locating just the right angles to turn the place into a tableau, a strange dancefloor for the two protagonists.

Or perhaps boxing ring is more apt: the burglar at first thinks the old man is insane, an assumption not assuaged by his being bathed and fed by his captor—all whilst still tied up. Much of this takes place without dialogue, or at least the dialogue is secondary. Phúc supplements elegant tracks in and out with a circular frame for much of the film’s first half, reminiscent of silent films’ experimentation with bizarre aspect ratios and shapes. The callback may be accidental, but it speaks to Phúc’s reliance on imagery rather than dialogue, which remains sparse even into the second half when the circular frame opens up, reverse-Looney Tunes style, to reveal the vast titular desert in a stunning wide. If the circle quirk is best only for reinforcing what Phúc is already doing, it still scratches a certain cinephilic itch that’s always there with an under-reported on festival sleeper: a genuinely visual film from a promising first-timer. TDLG

Slugs (Conner O’Malley, 2025, USA)

Like Nada in They Live (1988), in Slugs Conner O’Malley finds himself at misanthropic odds with the jaded world of consumerism—and like any wise Film Bro he understands the necessity for an iconic jacket.

O’Malley has, like Johnny Hamcheck, mastered the absurdist comedy of online personas clashing with unsuspecting members of the public. O’Malley, at least, wants his audience to believe so. More than anything, he understands the idiosyncratic nature of internet peculiarities and how they appeal to his audience, leading him to be dubbed “the internet’s most Online filmmaker”.

While The Mask (2025) and Pipe Rock Theory (2025) utilise internet conspiracy theory rhetoric in pursuit of narrative climax, Slugs turns to an inner disgruntlement with the outside world. Having established his intellectual and moral superiority over the world and its populace, he roots himself in the middle of the capitalist shrine that is the American Shopping Mall to accost passersby about their slugular status, like the sandwich board doomsayers of old. Never would he have expected to find love there, and find himself purchasing his new dame a red satin dress. Suddenly the mall seems such a perfect place, and once again world-hating is scuppered by becoming a Wife Guy.

Wife Guy to Dead Wife Guy soon has him back on the right track of hating on the Slugs, this time with an array of semi-automatics and shotguns ready to rumble in his hotel room by a busy freeway. The horseshoe theory of Conner O’Malley. KA

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025, USA)

An hour into the latest Mission Impossible film, Ethan Hunt jumps from a helicopter. Until then, unnecessary set-up reminds audiences of the series’ best moments (auteur action, litany of supporting faces, McQuarrie germaphobia). It’s a contradiction in the Cruise/Wagner/McQuarrie sovereignty, as though assuming the audience hasn’t seen these films despite their combined box office being in the billions. This video essay montage of best bits, intercut with exposition and plotting by a cast of prestige TV actors, is nonetheless exhilarating, a veritable Man With a Movie Camera (1929) for our favourite global superpower.

In an era where the doomsday clock is closer to midnight than ever, It’s something powerful to see a major Hollywood blockbuster put the flags of each nuclear power up on screen, and to feature a scene in which suits discuss which American city to bomb—even though their choice remains hilariously unnamed (I’d pick Boston). Though this is Cruise’s most flower-power vision since Vanilla Sky, it’s less ‘How did they get away with this?’ than ‘Are we even masking propaganda?’, for a Grok-ified world where audiences themselves risk losing to The Entity. For what it’s worth, I wish that our AI antagonist had more to do in this three hour film: it should have constantly been playing tricks on Ethan by locking him out of his phone, etc.

But from that helicopter jump, the payload is delivered. Most brilliantly: a deep sea set piece filmed with magnetic precision, true environmental storytelling in which above and under water present different challenges, and Cruise must navigate both at once, his face magnified through a scuba mask. It’s like a Legend of Zelda dungeon made flesh; 60 year old flesh which Cruise flaunts with abandon, such as in a boxers-only knife fight. Presuming this is the end of the star’s run of major action films, it’s a perfect way to go out. BF