In my review of the generally disappointing start to 2026 that was January, I commented that “I suspect February won’t hit eight Challenge films either.” Well, spoiler alert for the rest of this post: it didn’t. But it did improve on last month (marginally), so that’s something.

There have been external factors limiting my film viewing thus far this year, but things are taking a turn for the normal now, so hopefully March will mark an improvement. Until then, here’s the little February had to offer.

#4 Solo for Sparrow (1962) — Series Progression #1
#5 Playback (1962) — Series Progression #2
#6 Dead Souls (2025) — New Film #1
#7 The Naked Gun (2025) — Failure #2

• I watched four feature films I’d never seen before in February — double the number I watched in January.
• All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, but no rewatches this month.
• That does make this the best month of the year for new films, beating January’s two. Not much to boast about, but it’s better than going the other direction.
• You’d have to go back almost seven years to find a pair of months that were comparably as bad: four and five new films respectively in June and July 2019.
• In fact, with a grand total of six new films between them, the only other pairs of consecutive months that are equally as bad were almost 17 years ago, when July 2009 was my only ever zero-film month, and June and August either side of it only had six films apiece.
• From last month’s “failures” I watched The Naked Gun.
• But still no Blindspot or WDYMYHS films yet this year.

Favourite Film of the Month
Slim pickings again, but the reboot of The Naked Gun was good enough that it would’ve been a contender even in a typical month. It recaptures the spirit of the original trilogy perfectly but dodges the bullet of being slavishly self-referential, as so many other legacy sequels are. It’s unquestionably the same formula, but done in a way that fits the modern era. Sublime silliness.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
I watched a couple of films from the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series of B-movies this month. As I’ve found typical of that run of films, they’re perfectly adequate crime filler but rarely exceed that remit. Of this pair, Playback has an edge of originality (even if it’s still fundamentally a do-over of Double Indemnity), so Solo for Sparrow is the loser.

As I said at the start, I hold hope that next month will begin to see things turn around. “93 Films in 10 Months” isn’t quite as catchy a title, but it’s what I’m aiming for now.