This month, I enjoyed Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday in 4K for the first time, and had a little eleven-related cause for celebration of my own…

(No, the post title is not a typo — it was inspired by a combination of the German for “eleven”, and what I ended the month watching…)

#25 Red Eye (2005) — Failures #4
#26 Clue of the Twisted Candle (1960) — Physical Media #5
#27 Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023) — New Film #4
#28 West Side Story (2021) — Rewatch #4
#29 Clerks II (2006) — Series Progression #4
#30 Fear Eats the Soul (1974) — Blindspot #3
#31 Scarlet Street (1945) — WDYMYHS #3
#32 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring — Extended Edition (2001/2002) — Physical Media #6
#33 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers — Extended Edition (2002/2003) — Series Progression #5

• I watched 11 feature films I’d never seen before in April.
• Finally, a 10+ month! It’s the first since November. Hopefully it’ll be the start of a new golden run — I would love to do better and be more consistent this year (last year, seven months failed to reach 10). Obviously 2023 hasn’t got off to the best start either, but perhaps this will be the turn of the tide.
• It’s good news for 2023’s average to date, taking it from 8.3 to 9.0; although the rolling average for the last 12 months stays exactly the same, at 8.58, because I also watched 11 new films last April. Meanwhile, April’s own average slips slightly, from 14.9 to 14.7.
• Five of the new films counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with four rewatches.
• With only one “Rewatch” allowed per month, how they so many count? I shall explain, especially as some were recategorised at the end of the month (I doubt anyone was watching my Challenge Tracker that closely, but in case you were…)
• I originally counted Red Eye as a Rewatch, thinking I’d watch another March failure later in the month; and so I counted West Side Story as a Wildcard because the month’s Rewatch slot was taken. When it became clear I wasn’t going to have time for another March failure, I reclassified Red Eye to cover the Failures, which opened the Rewatch slot for West Side Story.
• Then, I could’ve counted the two Lord of the Rings films as rewatches under Wildcards, but it seemed silly to use up those slots now when I didn’t have to (who knows what I might want wildcards for later?) So, Fellowship winds up in Physical Media (my first time watching it on 4K Blu-ray) and Two Towers is Series Progression (the series being the Lord of the Rings trilogy, obviously).
• As you may have inferred, I watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy in 4K for the first time over the Bank Holiday weekend. Unfortunately, because the third day of the weekend was May 1st, the trilogy gets split across two monthly reviews. Not a problem; it just means the viewing list misses out on having a neat run of all three back to back. Well, there’s always my Recently Watched page for that.
• Talking of series, Clue of the Twisted Candle begins the Edgar Wallace Mysteries, a series of 50-odd B-movies that will surely help bulk out my Series Progression and Wildcard categories in the future.
• Having missed both Blindspot and WDYMYHS in March, ideally I needed to watch two of each this month to catch up. I didn’t manage that, but I kept them ticking over the with the requisite one apiece, so at least I’m no further behind.
• This month’s Blindspot film was my first experience of the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Fear Eats the Soul.
• This month’s WDYMYHS film was Fritz Lang’s noir about misguided affection and misattributed painting, Scarlet Street.
• From last month’s “failures” I rewatched Red Eye (in 4K).

Favourite Film of the Month
To be honest, while I liked a lot of films well enough this month, nothing blew me away. The nearest was Scarlet Street, which has a few interesting riffs on the noir ‘formula’, particularly thanks to its bumbling villains.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
It’s unfortunate to cite the initial instalment of a new series here, but Clue of the Twisted Candle was a pretty by-the-book kinda mystery. Not bad, just nothing that stood out. Well, it was a B-movie filler. It’d be nice if at least some of the future Edgar Wallace Mysteries were more impressive, though.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
Only two posts to choose from again, which hardly makes this award seem fair; or, rather, hardly worth mentioning. Neither bothered the top echelons of the chart, either; and, indeed, it was a dead-heat draw between the two. I need to start posting reviews again…

Coronation, Eurovision, and Bank Holidays galore! What this will mean for my film viewing, I have no idea.