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.

With summer well and truly over, it seems like an unexceptional month at the multiplex. That’s not to say there are no good films, just few that truly felt like A Big Deal. The one being most written about, at least as far as I saw, was a low-budget indie horror… starring a dog: Good Boy. I’m assured the eponymous doggo doesn’t die, and therefore I shall be watching it when it hits one streamer or another. Other horrors gracing the big screen in ‘Halloween month’ included Him, Black Phone 2, and Shelby Oaks.

The anti-Good Boy in terms of buzz was After the Hunt — despite being a new film from director Luca Guadagnino starring names like Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edibiri, I had to check more than once that it had actually been released and not delayed or something. The era of the movie star may be over (allegedly), but there were still plenty of famous faces to be found: Emma Stone as a bald possible-alien in Bugonia; Dwayne Johnson making a bid for legitimacy in wrestling biopic The Smashing Machine; Channing Tatum headlining crime biopic comedy Roofman; and Jared Leto continuing to be box office poison as Disney tried once again to make Tron into A Thing with Tron: Ares. This year’s mandatory music biopic was Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. I believe David Mackenzie’s Relay was also released, over a year after its TIFF premiere, but that’s another one with so little chatter that I can’t be certain. (I guess I could confirm this by scouring film listings or whatever, but, believe it or not, I don’t actually put that much effort into these lists.)

As the days get cold, the nights draw in, and many people would rather stay home in front of the telly, so the streamers start wheeling out bigger name originals, too. Well, most of them: the most Disney+ bothered to put forward was a remake of 1992 thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Quite who decided that was necessary or worthwhile (it’s hardly a big-name IP, is it?), I don’t know. I guess they think that kind of thing is a better use of money than, say, another season of Doctor Who, but who am I to judge. (I mean, at least Who has a certain level of dedicated fans who’ll stick with it however bad it gets. But I digress… and I’m not exactly sad about the Disney partnership ending anyway, so…)

For me, Prime Video nailed the biggest release of the month right at the start, with Shane Black being let out of director jail post-The Predator for heist action thriller Play Dirty. I don’t think the notices were that strong, but Black hits often enough for me to at least give it a go. The film is the ninth theatrical outing for literary anti-hero Parker, but you’d probably have to be a dedicated fan to know that because each one of those was a standalone offering and they’re spread across the last 60 years. Other titles catching my eye on Prime included The Ritual, starring Al Pacino and Dan Stevens as an old priest and a young priest performing an exorcism — hmm, sounds familiar… Apparently it did have a theatrical release back in May, but it could have been branded an original for all the awareness I had of it. Another “may or may not be the UK premiere” drop was Rust, aka that Alec Baldwin film. David Ehrlich has written what I suspect will be the definitive review of it, and I don’t think we need to say anything more about it.

Over on Netflix, the big-name title was a new film from Katherine Bigelow — her first since Detroit, eight years ago. A House of Dynamite sounds like a do-over of Cold War thriller Fail-Safe, but maybe it isn’t because I’ve not seen that comparison made as often as I expected to (or maybe I’m just out of the loop on stuff. Entirely possible). Another under-the-radar title (again, as far as I’m concerned) was Ballad of a Small Player, staring Colin Farrell and directed by Edward Berger, who’s managed to win the Best Film BAFTA for his last two directorial efforts — All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave — so, you never know, maybe this will suddenly swoop into the awards season conversation too (I have absolutely no idea). One film I know was a surprise, because I have seen others say it was a surprise, is spin-off The Rats: A Witcher Tale. You could argue it’s a TV special, what with it only scraping feature-length at 82 minutes, and apparently serving as some kind of bridge between season three and four of its parent show, but I’m not sure that distinction really means anything anymore anyway (and I’ve long advocated for the blurring/removal of the line). Finally, there was a new animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book The Twits — or, per the film’s tagline, an adaptation of the characters rather than the book itself. Whatever.

If we turn to films making their post-theatrical subscription streaming debut, there’s really only one horse in the race: Sky Cinema. Headlined by romcom fourquel Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy at the start of the month, they ended it with sci-fi AI thriller Companion, and in between brought kid-friendly animation Dog Man, plus a pair of Steven Soderbergh flicks that were both in cinemas earlier this year: haunting horror Presence and period spy thriller Black Bag. Soderbergh makes films faster than I can watch them (remember when he retired? Ha!), but they always go on my list.

As always, I could go on forever if I started digging into stuff jumping services and back catalogue additions, but a few that particularly caught my attention were Inside Llewyn Davis on Netflix, Jiro Dreams of Sushi on Prime, and If Beale Street Could Talk on iPlayer — it’s on and off there all the time, but if I mention it there’s a chance that’ll prompt me to finally watch it. For that same reason, this month’s reminders of stuff I own on unwatched discs included All the President’s Men (the third time it’s been a failure this year), the Back to the Future trilogy (how long ago did those 4Ks first come out? I dread to think), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Heat (also a three-time failure in 2025), The Train, folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (all three-and-a-quarter hours of it), a whole bunch of actual horrors — Deep Red, Don’t Look Now, Halloween 2018, The Haunting, The Others, Lovecraft fan film The Whisperer in Darkness — plus Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise, and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood.

I could go on, but that feels like enough of that — let’s instead talk about all the new stuff I’ve bought. Mmm, shiny! Especially shiny were the abundance of new-release 4K UHD titles I’ve picked up recently, including both recent theatrical titles — Jurassic World Rebirth, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and James Gunn’s Superman — and new editions of catalogue titles. The latter include a couple of major studio releases — Dead of Night from StudioCanal; The Rocky Horror Picture Show from Disney (it still feels wrong that Disney own Rocky Horror now) — but mostly come from a variety of boutique labels: The Crimson Rivers from Curzon; The Curse of Frankenstein from Hammer; Daughters of Darkness from Radiance; In the Mouth of Madness and Outland from Arrow. Plus, not brand-new but picked up in their current sale, Jean Rollin titles Requiem for a Vampire and The Escapees from Indicator (I’ve ordered more, but they’ll arrive on Monday and thus into next month’s update. Unless I watch them, of course. Haha.)

Similarly, I snagged Eureka’s 4K edition of The Old Dark House just before their site sold out of copies; and, at the same time, grabbed literally the last copy of their three-film set Martial Law: Lo Wei’s Wuxia World. Also from Eureka, another expansive box set of martial arts action in Furious Swords and Fantastic Warriors: The Heroic Cinema of Chang Cheh, containing ten films directed by the “one of the most prolific and accomplished directors ever to emerge from the Hong Kong film industry.” And on a slightly different tack, Larry Cohen’s The Ambulance, which I vaguely remember someone recommending for some reason many years ago — honestly, that kind of “some random person once said this was good” feels like my motivation for a surprisingly large number of my buying/viewing choices.

Those aforementioned Indicator sale 4Ks (remember, two paragraphs back) were joined by a couple of regular Blu-rays: Marlene Dietrich pre-Code melodrama The Song of Songs and Edward Dmytryk’s “dark and unsettling journey into the mind of a murderer”, Obsession (aka The Hidden Room). More of those next month, too. And that lone Radiance 4K (even further back in the paragraph mentioned in the brackets in the previous sentence) was accompanied by their other new releases this month: also from Harry Kümel (the director of Daughters of Darkness), Malpertuis; François Truffaut’s childhood summer drama Pocket Money; and a second box set of Japanese ghost stories in Daiei Gothic Vol. 2.

If you go back over the last three paragraphs of purchases, you’ll count quite a few horror and fantastical titles — makes sense to release those just in time for Halloween. Would’ve made sense to watch them around this time, too. What an innovative concept. Maybe next year. Or, knowing me, in three or four or ten years’ time. Or never, whatever.