Welcome to my monthly “Failures” column, where I look back at some of the films I could, would, maybe even should have watched last month… but failed to.

It’s that slightly-odd tail-end of summer time in cinemas at the moment (though, does the summer blockbuster season really exist anymore? Ever since Marvel started putting out major movies in the spring, and we’ve had major winter releases for even longer (at least since the 2001 double whammy of the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films), it feels like the idea of the year’s biggest movies being routinely limited to the summer months has evaporated. Regardless, August’s lot have that post-summer feel of movies aimed at a wide audience but that aren’t surefire major hits. We’re talking the latest M Night Shyamalan thriller, Trap; a new attempt to fresh the Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus; a reboot of The Crow; horrors Cuckoo and Afraid; psychological thriller Blink Twice; and apparently there was a new movie from Neil Marshall, Duchess, and video game adaptation Borderlands finally came out, though I don’t think I saw any actual talk about either, so they could’ve been bumped for all I know. And that’s without mentioning high-profile-ish rereleases like Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, a restored 3D version of Coraline (quite what needs restoring about such a recent film, I don’t know; maybe they just slap that label on any new rerelease now), and a 4K do-over of The Terminator (which I believe I heard James Cameron was involved with, so probably looks like shit).

The end of summer also means the streamers attempt to get back in on the action, with blockbuster-esque new releases in the form of Amazon Prime’s action-comedy from Paul Feig starring Awkwafina and John Cena, Jackpot!, and Netflix’s action-comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, The Union. Indeed, Wahlberg was pulling double duty for streamers this month, also appearing on Prime in true-story sports/dog movie Arthur the King. Even Apple TV+ got in on the action, tapping Matt Damon and Casey Affleck to star in director Doug Liman’s latest, action-comedy The Instigators. I guess the algorithm says people like action-comedies with stars in… There was also John Woo’s modern remake of his own action classic The Killer on Peacock in the US, but there’s no sign of a UK releaser or date yet. (Naturally, I’ve acquired a copy anyway.) They even got in on the “modified re-release” game, with Apple TV+ surprise dropping Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: The Director’s Cut earlier in the week, which adds 48 minutes to the already-lengthy movie. It also gives me the dilemma about which cut to watch, as I never got round to the original version. And speaking of director’s cuts, Netflix released Zack Snyder’s preferred versions of Rebel Moon Parts One and Two… or Chapters One and Two, I think they are now… with different subtitles, too. I don’t think anyone except Snyder diehards actually cared. (I appreciate this is tempting their vengeance, but I genuinely didn’t see anyone talking about those films after release day, and even on the day there was little more than an acknowledgment of their existence.)

Really, the most exciting thing from the streamers this month wasn’t any one film, but the fact NOW have finally added UHD quality. They used to lag so far behind in this — after all the others had introduced UHD, their version of HD was still only 720 — but now it seems they’ve caught up; and in one fell swoop too, because as soon as I noticed they had anything in UHD, it seemed almost everything was. So that’s nice. It makes me more inclined to actually watch stuff on there, whereas before it was a bit of a “stuff I’m not that fussed about but kinda want to see at some point”. And in terms of actual new additions, they had exciting recent releases like, er, Madame Web. Yeah. Of more interest, a couple of films I’d not heard of but I saw recommended in Radio Times: Irish noir thriller Barber and sci-fi romantic drama If You Were the Last. Also musical biopic All That Jazz, which crops up on “greatest films of all time” lists but never seems to be streaming anywhere.

On the more frustrating end of new-to-streaming titles, Disney+ debuted Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes almost two months before its disc release. I really want to see it, but I’m also inevitably going to buy it on physical media, so I want to wait for that… but there it is, on Disney+, tempting me. At least I don’t actually pay for Disney+ myself, so it’s a bit easier to resist. But I guess this is still their strategy to try to drive streaming over physical: “yeah, sure, we’ll release it physically eventually… but you can watch it on streaming right noooow…” Also Kinds of Kindness, the Yorgos Lanthimos film that arrived surprisingly quickly after his last one; but I haven’t watched that last one yet (i.e. Oscar winner Poor Things, also on Disney+), so his latest doesn’t exactly jump to the top of my viewing list.

What else was happening on the streamers? Netflix added Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color — I’ve still not got round to the colour version, so the black-and-white alternate is hardly a top priority for me. They also brought back The Power of the Dog in the UK, after its disappearance to be on iPlayer a couple of months ago; and the Criterion 4K release made it to the UK this month too, so now we’re spoilt for choice. Definitely the kind of film I feel I should see, and maybe I’ll like, but it also it feels like it’ll be heavy-going and I’ve got to be in the right frame of mind for that kind of thing. Maybe I’m wrong, who knows. I’ll find out someday. Just to rattle off a few other attention-grabbers from across the board: on Netflix, the film that provoked so much controversy with Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar acting nomination, To Leslie; on Amazon, a superhero movie I keep forgetting even exists, DC League of Super-Pets, but I remain kinda curious every time I remember it because it’s kind of an odd concept, really; also Scent of a Woman, which briefly, seemingly out of nowhere, popped into the IMDb Top 250 the other month, thus elevating it from “a film I’m vaguely aware exists” to “a film I should maybe watch”); and, oh, just so much other stuff.

I’m not even going to begin listing the stuff I own on disc that its appearance on streaming reminded me I really should’ve got round to watching — except I am going to “begin” that, because some highlights (if you can call anything about my constant failure a “highlight”) include Shaun of the Dead (which I’ve not seen in almost 20 years); Ben Affleck’s The Town (one of those films that’s hardly a ‘major’ movie but also feels daft I’ve never got round to); Tremors (a film I thought was merely fine when I first saw it, whereas now I think I might better appreciate the B-ish charms that made it a cult favourite, so I bought the Arrow 4K back whenever that came out); and the trilogy of Piotr Szulkin sci-fi movies that I blind bought the Radiance box set of — The War of the Worlds: Next Century, O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization, and Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes — but which are now also on MUBI, along with a fourth film (Golem) that was included in the US equivalent of the set but for which a different distributor was supposedly working on a UK release (which hasn’t yet materialised, as far as I know).

That’s only scratching the surface… and, naturally, I bought even more stuff that’s destined to be a similar failure in the future. Let’s begin with another box set of Eastern European genre titles: Deaf Crocodile’s Aleksandr Ptushko Fantastika Box, which includes the fantasy epics Ilya Muromets (released in the West — and riffed over on Mystery Science Theater 3000 — as The Sword and the Dragon), Sampo (similarly released and spoofed as The Day the Earth Froze), The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and Ruslan and Ludmila. Hopefully they’re as good as they look, because they look gorgeous; like classical fantasy art brought to life. Another box set making its way from the US into my hands this month was Severin’s Cushing Curiosities (featuring the films Cone of Silence, Suspect, The Man Who Finally Died, Blood Suckers, and Tender Dracula, plus the surviving episodes of Cushing’s BBC Sherlock Holmes series), which I picked up in their sale alongside a trio of Dario Argento titles: 4K UHD releases of The Five Days and Opera (aka Terror at the Opera in the UK), and the rarities collection Dario Argento’s Deep Cuts (which possibly doesn’t merit listing here as a lot of it is made-for-TV content, but I’ve mentioned it now, so there we go).

Back at home, this month’s only brand-new released was The Fall Guy in 4K, but the boutiques drained my bank account as thoroughly as ever: from Arrow, Robert Rodriguez’s Mexico Trilogy, including a 4K disc for Desperado (probably the best-regarded of the three, and also the only one I’ve never seen, having caught Once Upon a Time in Mexico in the cinema back in 2003 and El Mariachi on a previous DVD version of this trilogy set); from Eureka in the Masters of Cinema range, Kinji Fukasaku’s yakuza classic Wolves, Pigs & Men; and from Radiance, more gangsters in Tai Kato’s Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza, plus their second World Noir box set (encompassing Germany’s Black Gravel, France’s Symphony for a Massacre, and Japan’s Cruel Gun Story); plus, excitingly, from partner label Raro Video, The Italian Connection, which completes Fernando Di Leo’s Milieu Trilogy (alongside a Raro release from earlier this year, The Boss, and a title Arrow put out nine years ago, Milano Calibro 9). Finally (literally, because it’s officially out today but my copy turned up on the last day of August), 101 Films’ UHD upgrade for Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, which I intended to watch back when I was watching all of Villeneuve’s earlier films in the run up to Dune, but didn’t and so is a possibility for this year’s WDYMYHS list.

I say “finally” — I bought a further 16 titles in sales of one kind or another. From the US, A*P*E in 3D; George A. Romero’s Creepshow in 4K plus Just Desserts: The Making of Creepshow; Flicker Alley’s Argentinian noir Never Open That Door; a couple of US-exclusive titles from UK labels: Arrow’s release of John Wayne’s final film, The Shootist, and Indicator release Untouched (which, somewhat aptly given its title, is a US-only release because the BBFC insisted on cuts); and Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell and Walker. And from the UK, a quartet of StudioCanal Cult Classics: Blazing Magnum, Devil Girl from Mars, The Final Programme, and Horrors of the Black Museum; the BFI’s 4K of Full Circle (aka The Haunting of Julia) and volume 3 of their Short Sharp Shocks series; classic ghost story The Queen of Spades; and Lisa Joy’s Hugh Jackman-starring sci-fi noir Reminiscence. When you lay it out like that, it kinda sounds like I have a problem. But shh, don’t tell anyone, because then I might have to deal with it.