Cinema Year ‘25: March
Marching Powder / Baby Invasion / Mickey 17 / Cherub
Good morning and welcome to a new feature on Cinema Year Zero… Cinema Year ‘25.
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 March, with words by Ben Flanagan, Esmé Holden, and Blaise Radley. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive next week’s Discovery capsules to your inbox.
Marching Powder (Nick Love, 2025, UK)
He’s unlikely to ever grace the cover of Sight & Sound, but Nick Love is one of Britain’s most notable 21st century filmmakers. Marching Powder, his latest collaboration with star Danny Dyer, continues to chronicle the waning days of geezerdom by part Football Factory (2001) remake, part culture-clash rom-com, and all state-of-the nation, men’s mental health screed.
Love’s dialectic separates Jack (Dyer), who tries to better himself after a drug-addled hooliganism arrest through labour; first at a hipster coffee shop, but mostly by working for his underworld-adjacent father-in-law; and his wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas). Her exploits at art college, where she falls under the spell of hunky tutor Vaughn, break up the away-day violence. She bristles at her assignment, a painting based on ‘movement’, which she argues is a term used by artists only to discuss hipster topics such as migration. She is proven right at the art show where her millennial classmates present hackneyed images of boat crossings. She opts to paint a portrait of Jack, who stays at home to look after their child by himself for the first time and immediately fall off the wagon. ‘It’s the boredom that kills you.’
No chance of being knocked off by Marching Powder then, which assaults the viewer with loaded scenes from minute 1, an animated coming of age prologue which features the first of several transphobic asides. Love takes an ‘anti-woke’ stance as a default, but what strikes the Love/Dyer enthusiast is how perfunctory it seems. Even at his most unpleasant in films like the Schrader-inflected Outlaw (2007), Love was able to show and not tell. Through budget, or gout-aged malaise, Marching Powder’s constant barrage of culture war lingo is a sticking plaster for overlit sets and incoherent action scenes more than any devout ideology. It culminates, inevitably, with Dyer looking at the camera and spitting out that word, ‘Kimchi’. BF
Baby Invasion (Harmony Korine, 2024, USA)
Harmony Korine continues his middle aged dive into the aesthetics of video games, moving from the meaningless jargon of the cutscene, extended into pure, irritating abstraction in AGGRO DR1FT (2023), to the contradictory immediacy and distance of the first person shooter in Baby Invasion. We are mostly fixed to a single perspective in the titular game, where invaders with their faces anonymised as babies break into the homes of rich, helpless families. But before, in a brief interview with the developers, we are told the game was leaked onto the dark web (lol) during development and became so widely imitated in real life, streamed through the same first person point of view, that the boundaries between it and reality were blurred away entirely.
This new reality is one of violence, but we see surprisingly little of it; there are far more bloodied bodies than there are shootouts. Instead, driven in large part by the consuming Burial score, there is an overwhelming atmosphere of violence that bleeds into everything, even the directionless wandering that takes up most of the film’s eighty minutes. Occasionally something more pointed breaks out, like an extended sequence where a crying woman is held in terror, her head mockingly patted, but it never explodes into something more. It exists only for its own sake, for the pleasure of creating that feeling in someone else.
And so there is no catharsis to be found, there’s no sense of justice or even revenge in these attacks of justified economic resentment. All these feelings (and any thoughts understanding them) have long been ground into a kind of empty jealousy—all the players seem to want to do is linger endlessly in these houses, playing as if they were their own–-as with grindset masculinity they blindly imitate the logic of the very “matrix” they are supposedly rebelling against.
Spending so much time within this oblivious perspective captures the unique alienation of watching someone else playing a video game you don’t understand; looking distantly through a POV that is both out of your control and entirely inscrutable. We are placed at a dissociative distance, but one that countless people choose to spend hours a day in when watching live streams. This makes Baby Invasion almost completely unwatchable at points, it’s boring and nasty and unbearable, but in the way that the world so often is now. And that basically makes it a good movie. EH
Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho, 2025, USA)
A case has (facetiously) been made on Twitter and other short form social media platforms that Mickey 17 is legible as an act of corporate terrorism by Bong Joon Ho, an intentional waste of over $100 million dollars cashed from Warner Bros. and, most particularly, one David Zaslav, the pantomime CEO villain who turns films into tax write offs with a click of his fingers. That Mickey 17 is also readily interpretable (in as much as it rams your head through the point with the forcible precision of a fighter jet) as a parody of Donald Trump reinforces that idea: Bong is here to kick capitalist establishment butt and take names. Far from an act of middle finger pointing at WB cronies, however, Mickey 17 is a characteristically sincere (and annoying) social satire from a director who loves to get A Little Wacky.
The issue, which will be quite apparent to anyone who has attempted a political reading of either of Bong’s English language features Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) (or, whisper it, even his more-lauded Korean works), is that they have the same nuance as an op-ed in The I and the sophisticated comedy of an almost-scrapped SNL bit. That trend certainly doesn’t abate with Mickey 17. Pairing Mark Ruffalo, a “serious” actor who clearly enjoys the opportunity to goof off, with Toni Colette, an actor who has built a career out of loudly mugging at the camera, is troubling from the off. Giving them a soft-lib script that a) clearly never believed Trump would make a second term and b) demonstrates a level of understanding of Trump’s character that could only have been drawn from 5-second memes, is a disaster. Perhaps that’s why the finished film has clearly been cut to ribbons. BR
Cherub (Devin Shears, 2024, Canada)
There is a warmth to every frame of Cherub, an almost wordless story of a lonely overweight man who feels undesirable and invisible. I imagine it would have been shot on 16mm if anyone could afford to do that these days, nonetheless a graduation film that blossomed into something much more, having screened at BFI Flare, the biggest queer film festival in the UK.
It’s easy to fall in love with Harvey (Benjamin Turnbull) as we share almost every one of the film’s quiet moments with him. His loneliness is so palatable, but writer-director Devin Shears isn’t afraid to show its uncomfortable side effects, stopping the film from melting in a tender-queer mush. In an indoor park Harvey watches a couple kiss, slowly turning his camera towards them to sneak a candid, somewhat perverse photo. He often looks at women with a gaze that would make them uncomfortable if they ever noticed him.
It’s not surprising then, when he saunters into a porn shop, where he comes across a bear-adjacent magazine called ‘Cherub’, a celebration of big men and the people who love them. Suddenly, this straight man sees a way for himself to be desirable. Sure, no one has the right to be desired, that’s incel talk, but everyone has the right to feel desirable, and queerness expands those possibilities even for people nominally outside of it.
And so in a movie that tends towards slightness, little gestures and light chuckles, it almost feels like a burst into melodrama when Harvey takes photos of himself to send the magazine, in silly little angel wings and halo, and a small smile runs across his face. I found it hard to hold myself together, imagining the ways that I too, even if vastly different and still a little absurd, could allow myself to feel beautiful. EH