The 2025 Summer Journal is Out Now

Dinosaurs are wreaking havoc, spies are plunging into oceans, superheroes are soaring through the skies. You guessed it: it’s summertime at the movies. Since a number of 2025 releases have a distinctly Nineties flavour – with their fresh spins on beloved cinematic properties – we decided to reflect that in this issue’s nostalgia-tinged cover design, a recreation of a teen’s bedroom from the era conceived by our art director Gabby Keresztes and captured by photographer Krisztián Sipos. Travel back in time with its period-appropriate medley of floppy discs and Furbies, Tamagotchis and Troll dolls.

In these pages, you’ll find interviews with the filmmakers behind the season’s most exciting releases. Those still recovering from Past Lives (2023) will be relieved to hear that Celine Song’s latest love-triangle romance, Materialists, is in a lighter register. The Oscar-nominated writer speaks to Hannah Strong about how working as a matchmaker inspired her Dakota Johnson-starring rom-com. Plus, Jurassic World: Rebirth casting director Jina Jay considers the art of selecting an ensemble for a reboot, and My Father’s Island cinematographer Amine Berrada discusses shooting in the unforgiving climes of a Scandinavian winter.

Aside from new films, we’re offering audiences a chance to watch classics on the big screen with Curzon Film Club, which launches this summer and will run throughout the year. To celebrate the programme’s Michael Haneke retrospective, Catherine Wheatley mounts a defence of serious cinema, while Guy Lodge takes us on a globetrotting tour across sweltering metropolises – from Spike Lee’s New York to Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong – for the club’s Summer in the City strand. Also back in cinemas is Miloš Forman’s classical-music opus Amadeus (1984), prompting violinist Joshua Bell to extol the film’s provocative characterisation of Mozart.

As ever, we have a roster of think pieces exploring the most pressing questions of the summer-movie season. With 2022’s murderous, hip-swishing robot doll returning to screens in M3GAN 2.0, Michael Blyth explores representations of AI in horror, which, despite feeling contemporary, has a storied history stretching all the way back to silent cinema. Speaking of AI, regular readers will know I always have a take when it comes to the Mission: Impossible franchise – don’t worry, it’s not ‘The Entity is misunderstood, actually’. Head to page 42 to read about the fraternal relationship that, according to me at least, underpins both The Final Reckoning and the action series as a whole. And, what’s that in the distance? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s… Helen O’Hara, coming to tell the studio bosses how to construct an interconnected superhero universe. (Hint: you can plan, but don’t forget to have fun.) 

Yasmin Omar
Editor-in-chief, Summer Journal