It’s some kind of irony that this month I failed to get my failures post written in a timely fashion (not that I think anyone particularly cares about it being late), but I’ve been struggling with a nasty cold the past few days and so had neither the time nor energy to devote to it.

No such excuses for not making it to the cinema last month, just my general lackadaisical attitude to catching films on the big screen. That makes me a contributor to the underwhelming box office of The Fall Guy and Furiosa, as well as Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — all films I’m very much looking forward to seeing, for one reason or another (mostly: the trailers look good; but also the franchise pedigree of the latter two). Other theatrical releases in the past month that I might watch at some point but, frankly, I was never going to go out of my way to see included The Garfield Movie, Love Lies Bleeding, Tarot, Young Woman and the Sea, and If (no connection to if…., but that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m liable to make a joke about if I ever review it — see my review of Frozen for similar).

Streaming original premieres looked even weaker than normal by comparison to that lot, with the most noteworthy probably being Jerry Seinfeld Pop-Tarts comedy Unfrosted (I saw a clip of the ‘surprise’ Mad Men cameos on Twitter. Thank goodness I didn’t watch the whole thing for that). Netflix also offered sci-fi Atlas, with a moderately name-y cast, but I’ve not seen a single person mention it, before or after release, which I figure doesn’t bode well for its quality. Over on Amazon, there was Harry Styles-inspired romcom The Idea of You and, um, the movie edit of Roku-premiering TV series Die Hart 2: Die Harter. (Implausibly, that’s been recommissioned for a third season, so I guess there’ll be a third “movie” as an “Amazon Original” at some point in the future, too.)

It was a relatively thin month for theatrical releases making their streaming debuts, too, with Disney+ only offering horror prequel The First Omen and Sky Cinema on the same “revived ’70s horror series” bandwagon with The Exorcist: Believer, plus minor-league DC superhero Blue Beetle (is it in continuity with that studio’s forthcoming films or not? I forget) and another “somewhat implausible it even got commissioned” action threequel, The Equalizer 3. More significantly, Amazon Prime debuted dystopian YA prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (which I already own on disc) and Netflix surprised everyone with Godzilla Minus One (technically on June 1st, but as that’s already a few days ago I thought I may as well include it). With any information about a Western home video release for that most recent Japanese Godzilla flick being kept as quiet as a state secret, I’d already joined the crowd in pirating the thing; and I cancelled my Netflix subscription at the end of May too, so I’ll still watch that downloaded copy at some point. (I can’t say I feel too guilty about that considering I’ll surely buy it on disc, when/if they ever announce one over here.)

There was, of course, the usual glut of back catalogue titles hopping from one service to another or just plain popping up again, with particularly notable ones including The Black Phone, Brian and Charles, Bullet Train, and Minions: The Rise of Gru on Netflix (as I say, I’ve cancelled my sub, but I do have access to the latter two films in other ways); Amores Perros, Bone Tomahawk, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Natural Born Killers, The Others, and Studio 666 on Prime Video, along with a bunch of Gamera films (I confess, I’ve still not even opened the Arrow box set I bought back when it first came out, so long ago I dread to even look up when that was); on Channel 4, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Presidents, Moonfall, and multiple titles I’ve bought on 4K disc but not got round to (re)watching, including Carlito’s Way, Collateral, Fanny Lye Deliver’d, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, and George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing; and the BBC seem to have been having a bit of a Christopher Nolan season, with the TV premiere of Tenet, plus Dunkirk, Memento, and the one I particularly want to note, The Prestige — I haven’t seen it since a DVD rewatch 16 years ago, and I bought the 4K disc a while back, so there are multiple reasons it’s long overdue a revisit.

You might think facts and lists like those in the last paragraph would stop me buying more films on disc — but if you thought that, it would show you don’t know me very well at all. The wild and wonderful additions to my ever-expanding, storage-space-challenging collection this past month include multiple new-to-4K titles like The Dreamers, Dune: Part Two, The Valiant Ones, and, despite the controversy surrounding its presentation, Once Upon a Time in the West. Talking of controversy, I also bought some bootleg releases this month — not something I normally do, but I happened to discover eBay sales for the Hong Kong Rescue editions of Hard Boiled, The Killer, and Peking Opera Blues. If official releases seemed imminent, or even likely, I’d have happily waited (other films released by HKR have since had genuine releases, and I’ve bought those instead), but the rights for at least two of these titles are apparently-impossibly entangled (and people keep requesting Peking Opera Blues and it keeps not coming out, so I presume there’s some problem there as well), so I caved.

There was more Hong Kong action in 88 Films’ release of Jackie Chan-starring Fearless Hyena Part II, plus their release of British-produced Western Hannie Caulder. The BFI released Stephen Poliakoff’s film debut, thriller Hidden City, while Indicator returned to their Columbia Noir series for a sixth volume, this time encompassing eight-film crime series the Whistler. Finally (although I think it must’ve been more-or-less the first thing to arrive, because it doesn’t feel like it was only this month), another pile of titles from the US, this time from Vinegar Syndrome partner labels. I think there was an offer on, though my interest was initially piqued by a forthcoming local screening of Russian sci-fi Kin-Dza-Dza!, which led me to discover the Deaf Crocodile Blu-ray release, which led me to a mix of other stuff I’d had an eye on (animations Cat City and Heroic Times) and stuff that captured my attention while browsing: sometime Letterboxd fave All About Lily Chou-Chou; video store documentary Mom n’ Pop; and “rotoscoped time travel Western” Quantum Cowboys. This is really the “wild and wonderful” stuff I was referring to earlier. Whether or not they’re also “good”, I’ll find out whenever I finally get round to watching any of them…