From Mission: Impossible - The final Reckoning to Parthenope - what’s on at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in May 2025
Our film critic, Mark Walsh, takes a look at what’s coming to the big screen, in this column sponsored by Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.
Cloud
The name Kurosawa is synonymous with Japanese cinema, but while director Kiyoshi is no relation to his legendary namesake Akira, he’s carved out a career full of variations on the horror genre, including Cure, Pulse and Creepy. His latest foray into psychological horror and action examines what happens when the unfiltered anger of the internet spills over into the real world.
Yoshii (Masaki Suda) does so well with his dodgy online reselling business that he quits his job and takes on an assistant. But his equally dissatisfied suppliers and customers band together on an online forum, and when they discover his address, they track him down to enact their revenge.
His escape leads to a cat-and-mouse chase before bullet-strewn showdowns, leading Yoshii to have to deal with the consequences of his actions. Kurosawa’s escalating thriller premiered at Cannes before becoming Japan’s choice to represent them in last year’s Oscars.
Cloud is screening from Friday, 25 April.
Parthenope
Paolo Sorrentino has continued the finest traditions of Italian cinema, following in the footsteps of his notable peers such as Federico Fellini and Michaelangelo Antonioni with opulent, elegant dramas such as The Great Beauty.
His latest, taking its name from the siren of Greek mythology, is a coming-of-age story which takes its name from the director’s Neapolitan home (also the setting for his previous film The Hand Of God).
Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) captures the hearts of the men around her as easily as her siren namesake. Beginning at her birth in 1950, Sorrentino’s film charts her development through the late Sixties and Seventies as she becomes an anthropology student, including her relationships with an older boy and her brother, as she comes to understand the power her beauty has over them. One of the few resistant to her charms is writer John Cheever (Gary Oldman), who is nonetheless as drawn to her as her various suitors.
Sorrentino is, as is often the case, as interested in nature as he is nurture, examining not only Parthenope’s effect on those around her but the city of Naples itself and its equally complex identity. The director’s lush visuals are embellished by an operatic score by Lele Marchitelli, creating a slice of Italian life that will feel familiar to fans of Sorrentino and Italian cinema, but might draw in a few new fans as well.
Parthenope is screening from Friday, 2 May.
Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning
We have been choosing to accept that Tom Cruise is unparalleled in his commitment to delivering stunt work as an actor for almost three decades.
From Brian De Palma’s thrillingly cheeky spin on the original TV series, through films from John Woo, JJ Abrams and Brad Bird to the current run of four written and directed by The Usual Suspects scribe Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise has dangled from a cargo plane and the top of the Burj Khalifa, had a dogfight in a helicopter, driven a motorcycle off a cliff and is now back to see if he can top all of these for one final outing - or is it? - as superspy Ethan Hunt.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it one final time, is to join Cruise and his returning gang of IMF agents and shady rivals (including the ever present Ving Rhames, and Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby and many more) as they attempt to stop a malevolent AI from destroying the world. The trailer suggests that the film will be weaving together threads and pulling in references from most of the previous films (including returns for Henry Czerny and Rolf Saxon, both veterans of De Palma’s original), but don’t worry if your memory of these films has self-destructed: it’s all about the camaraderie of Cruise and his team, and the jaw-dropping stunts.
The trailer already hints at Cruise dangling upside down from a biplane and jumping into the sea from an aircraft carrier: the big screen of the Arts Picturehouse is the perfect place to find out what else Cruise and McQuarrie have in store.
Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning is screening from Friday, 21 May.
The Room
That old saying, that something is so bad that it’s actually good, isn’t true: bad things are normally just bad. But just occasionally, something is so toe-curlingly, cringingly awful in every sense that it transcends all definitions of quality to become a work of inexplicable genius.
The Room is just that film and watching it a few years ago at the Arts Picturehouse was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema; now you get the chance to have that experience in the presence of one of the film’s stars.
The driving force behind it is Tommy Wiseau, who wrote, directed and acted - and I use each of those terms with increasing looseness - in what is supposed to be a love-triangle drama (despite Wiseaus’s later claims that the film is a black comedy).
Wiseau is Johnny, a successful banker whose fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle) is having an affair with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). Wiseau modelled his performance and direction on influences from Orson Welles to James Dean, including one of the film’s most famous lines, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” which is delivered with a hilariously bad version of Dean’s anguished wailing.
Sestero wrote a memoir of his experiences on the film which later became the James Franco film The Disaster Artist. That documented the tortured production process and Wiseau’s eccentricity. But the awful dialogue, plot cul-de-sacs, narrative non-sequiturs, terrible acting, and bizarre directing choices all add up to a film that is immensely watchable and utterly compelling.
Sestero will be at the cinema for a Q&A after the screening to discuss what has become, quite rightly, a cult classic, and to share his experience of what has become a defining moment in the history of terrible cinema.
The Room, with a live Q&A with Greg Sestero, is screening on Sunday, 25 May.
