From The Phoenician Scheme to F1: what’s on at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in June 2025
Our film critic, Mark Walsh, in a column sponsored by the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, explores what to watch on the big screen.
The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson has arguably the most distinctive visual style of any mainstream filmmaker working in Western cinema, a style he’s refined over the course of the last two decades. That style, which includes camera movement in seemingly two-dimensional scenes, snap zooms, and a distinctive palette and art direction, became more developed in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited before reaching its peak in Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
His more recent films have been more experimental in story structure, The French Dispatch being broken up into chapters and Asteroid City melded the creation of a play with the events it depicts in a retro-futuristic Fifties setting. For his latest, it’s more of the same, with Roman Coppola once again having helped to develop the story (their sixth partnership in the writing room), and Alexandre Desplat also scores his sixth film for the auteur. The biggest change is that his regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman is taking a break, here being replaced by Bruno Delbonnel (Amélie, Inside Llewyn Davis).
The plot is typical Wes Anderson as well, suitably convoluted and permitting roles for a host of his ever-expanding troupe of actors. The wonderfully named Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) appoints his only daughter (Mia Threapleton), a nun, to be the sole heir to his business as he launches the bold new gambit of the film’s title, bringing the estranged pair together to try to find the investment he needs. The cast includes (sharp intake of breath) Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathiew Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray and more. Those looking for their regular fix of Wes should be suitably sated.
The Phoenician Scheme is out now.
Nosferatu (1922)
Having made a visit to Cambridge last year to accompany German expressionist horror classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Hugo Max returns to the Arts Picturehouse as part of his 2025 UK tour. The British-Australian filmmaker, musician and painter is once again travelling the country, performing improvised viola scores to silent classics, in this case a trio of films by another German expressionist filmmaker from the silent era, F.W. Murnau. For his visit to Cambridge, he’ll be accompanying one of the greatest films of all from that era, Nosferatu.
The enduring classic, remade only this year by contemporary horror director Robert Eggers, is a version of the 1922 film which is itself a revisiting of the Dracula mythos. Max Shreck is Count Orlok, the vampire taking in an interest in the wife of his estate agent and which relocates the events of Bram Stoker’s novel to Germany. Despite attempts by the Stoker estate to supress the film, it survived and became a classic of its genre, a film ripe for the accompaniment of the rich, deeper range of the viola.
Nosferatu is screening on Sunday, 1 June.
Rediscover: Friday the 13th
I’ve been a sufferer for many years of a common phobia. The name given to this particular affliction is friggatriskaidekaphobia, otherwise known as a fear of Friday the 13th.
I’m far from alone: hotels and streets around the world hold that same fear of 13, omitting the number and skipping straight from 12 to 14.
Maybe that explains why the Friday the 13th horror franchise has been so enduring, featuring nine sequels, a remake and even a battle between the series’ main antagonist Jason Voorhees and that other horror icon, Freddy Krueger. But, like many long running franchises, it all started very differently, and there’s a chance to revisit the film that launched this iconic horror series on the very date of the title.
Set at a summer camp and following a group of camp counsellors including Adrienne King and Harry Crosbie, they’re picked off one by one by an unseen force. The cast of former soap opera actors – which include a young Kevin Bacon in an early role – are fodder for one of the most enduring horror films of all time. Don’t miss this chance to revisit Sean Cunningham’s franchise-launcher, but do be careful as you head out to the Arts Picturehouse – you never know what might happen on this particular day…
Friday The 13th is screening, unsurprisingly, on Friday, 13 June.
F1
Joseph Kosinski defied all the odds to deliver a sequel to Top Gun that not only exceeded the original, it set a template for action cinema in the current decade.
It helps when you have a star with the wattage of Tom Cruise who’s willing to get himself and his castmates into planes and getting them into the sky to give an unparallelled sense of realism and thrill. For all of the advances in CGI, there’s no substitute for at least a little of the real thing.
But how do you attempt to replicate that success? Well, swap fighter jets for Formula One cars and Tom Cruise for Brad Pitt and you’re off to a reasonable start. Attempting to capture the same verisimilitude that made Top Gun: Maverick so thrilling, Kosinski, Pitt and the team behind the film – which includes legendary producer Jerry Bruckheimer – got the actors into real cars (in this case modified Formula 2 cars) and then turned up to Grand Prix weekends to film them on real tracks. With significant advances on the camera technology since Maverick, Kosinski has been able to capture more of the action.
The film also features the whole roster of real world F1 drivers, and Lewis Hamilton also serves as one of the film’s producers. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, an F1 driver from the Nineties who retires after a bad crash.
The owner of the fictional Apex team, Ruben (Javier Bardem), needs a mentor for rookie Noah (Damson Idris) so tempts Hayes out of retirement. The cast also includes Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies and Shea Whigham, but it’s the array of scintillatingly fast vehicles and the action on the track that are set to be the real stars.
F1 opens on Wednesday, 25 June.
