Monthly Archives: September 2026

August’s Failures

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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.

We begin this month with an oddity, for two reasons. Coyote vs. Acme was, famously, to be ditched by Warner Bros as a tax write-off, meaning it would never seen the light of day — a fate that’s befallen several films under the studio’s current management. It was eventually sold to an indie distributor instead, which means it’s actually seen the light of day — a victory for art and common sense. It’s a release we should support. And I am! That’s the other unusual thing: yes, I failed to see it this month, but I’ve booked to see it on Sunday. I think that might be the first time I’ve been able to mention a film in this column when I’ve already booked a ticket for it.

Another film I would actually have gone to see if it wasn’t prohibitively expensive to travel to the nearest place it was showing — on top of the already extortionate cost of a cinema ticket — was Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which already looked interesting and then was well reviewed to boot. Also out this month and worth mentioning (because does it really count as a failure if I’ll probably never watch it anywhere at all?) were non-park-based dinosaur flick The End of Oak Street; Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars; “The Purge but with sex (except they cut all the sex scenes)”, One Night Only; and another erotic comedy that’s inherently superior because they left the sex in, I Want Your Sex. Not often I’ll write “sex” four times in one sentence, but there you go.

I don’t know if it’s an indicator of the time of year or if their release schedule is just kinda random, but Netflix popped out a few originals this month too. I heard mixed things about drama Don’t Say Good Luck, but nothing good about sci-fi/horror The Last House, a film which answers the question “whatever happened to director Louis Leterrier?” Also just out, crime thriller The Whisper Man, with a moderately starry cast (Robert De Niro!) and another set of mediocre reviews. Apparently it’s one of their top launches of the year though, which to me just shows how low the bar is. The only other streaming premiere I’ve noted is Lena Headey action thriller Ballistic on Amazon Prime Video, another effort barely of note. I guess you could also count Disney+’s release of a new director’s cut of the second X Files movie, which now goes by the ridiculous mouthful of a title The X Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, but it’s not exactly “new”.

Subscription streaming debuts are a stronger bet, as usual, especially for Sky Cinema / NOW subscribers, where last month you’d find the likes of Hamnet and… um… I guess Song Sung Blue got some attention? Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 will appeal to certain people? Twinless and Love Me both sound interesting but I’m not sure how ‘new’ they actually are. Prime was also fairly strong in this film, in fact, with the new David Lowery film, Mother Mary, and one of this year’s Jason Statham flicks, Shelter, plus Return to Silent Hill, which is based on a video game highly acclaimed for its story, though apparently the film version is quite shit. Also Twisters, jumping there from Sky, while Hugh Grant-starring horror Heretic does an unusual jump in the other direction.

Then, from the usual mass of back catalogue additions, those particularly standing out to me this month with a sense of “oh yeah, I really should watch that sometime” included Monster’s Ball and The Tailor of Panama on Netflix; A Cure for Wellness, A Fish Called Wanda, and Freaky on Prime; and Inside Llewyn Davis, Lady Macbeth, Sing Sing, Tár, and Women Talking on iPlayer. Also now on iPlayer: Kill, an Indian action movie that made headlines when its US remake rights were bought before it was even released, and which has previously been a failure twice already (in July 2024 for its UK theatrical release and January 2025 when it was on Prime).

That’s not even mentioning films I already own on discs I’ve never played, mind, a category that this month includes Gladiator II, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, The Third Man (which I have seen, but has been overdue a rewatch for decades), M Night Shyamalan’s Trap, and even obscure Hammer thriller 36 Hours, which I only hit 4K disc recently.

Normally I’d transition to new disc purchases off the back of that, but one other streaming title of note to me is Atlas: The Animated Movie, a project I backed on Kickstarter four years ago (time flies!) off the back of a YouTube video, which last weekend finally saw the light of day for backers, and I believe is heading to YouTube for general audiences in the next couple of weeks. It nearly snuck in to August as 2026’s #50; it might still claim that number yet, just in September.

Another brand-new release entering my collection (the only one this month, in fact) was Project Hail Mary — which, yes, I only just watched last month on Prime, but I’d already preordered it. Just the regular 4K UHD release, unfortunately, not the Steelbook with extra extras, because I missed that said extra extras were included so didn’t preorder it and now it’s sold out everywhere. Grr. I’m hoping for a last-minute restock somewhere when it actually comes out, but I don’t have much hope.

As usual nowadays, most other purchases were also 4K releases from boutique labels of older films, to one degree of “old” or another — from a 10th anniversary edition of Hunt for the Wilderpeople back to Radiance’s edition of 1970s Polish surrealist horror The Hourglass Sanatorium. In between, in chronological order, sit Second Sight’s The Name of the Rose (1986), Jackie Chan’s Armour of God (also 1986) from 88 Films, Transmission’s Vampire’s Kiss (1988), John Woo’s Once a Thief (1991) and Troy (2004) from Arrow, The Descent (2005) from StudioCanal (do they count as a boutique? Eh), and Anime Ltd completing a trio of Mamoru Hosoda box sets with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006).

Back on regular ol’ 1080p Blu-ray, there was, of course, a Eureka a title — a quartet of Hong Kong action under the banner title Reap the Whirlwind: Four Films with Angela Mao — plus more from Radiance in the shape of gritty Japanese boxing drama The Boxer and “metaphysical giallo” The Double, plus a box set of Jean-Luc Godard works, led by his eight-part Histoire(s) du cinéma and also including the Blu-ray debut of his final short, Scénarios.

Finally, from Transmission again, some television. Yes, usually outside the purview of this column, but this blog has never made a huge distinction between theatrical movies and TV movies, and the two examples of the latter bundled in Two Boxes: Televised Terror in Franco’s Spain include Antonio Mercero’s short-film-length La cabina, which I’d previously heard about multiple times on social media down the years as an under-appreciated classic. Will that be enough to actually get the disc in my player this coming month? Never say never…

The 20th Monthly Review of August 2026

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Back in May, I noted how far behind target I was — at the time, 15 films. Since then, it only got worse… but this month, it finally improves!

Although not even to as far behind as I was in May, unfortunately — I’m still 17 films off where I should be. That means I have to average 13 qualifying films every month for the rest of the year to make it to #100. The last time I managed that many films in a single month was December 2024, and the last time I managed it for four months on the trot was in early 2021… but there’s still hope! A fool’s hope, maybe, but that was good enough for Gandalf.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#39 Death Trap (1962) — Series Progression #5
#40 Flavia (2026) — New Film #8
#41 Thor: Love and Thunder 3D (2022) — 50 Unseen #4
#42 The Black Phone (2021) — Wildcard #8
#43 Woman in the Dunes (1964) — WDYMYHS #3
#44 The Singing Ringing Tree (1957) — Failure #8
#45 Robot Monster 3D (1953) — Genre #3
#46 Point Break (1991) — Rewatch #3
#47 Dersu Uzala (1975) — WDYMYHS #4
#48 Dragonfly Squadron 3D (1954) — Genre #4
#49 Quatermass and the Pit (1967) — Series Progression #6


  • I watched 10 feature films I’d never seen before in August.
  • That makes it the first month to hit my minimum first-time watch goal since last November. Hooray!
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
  • I last saw that rewatch, Point Break, in 2007, the first year of this blog. The same was true of This Is Spinal Tap before I rewatched it in March. It feels fitting for the blog’s 20th year to be rewatching films from its first — maybe I should try to do that for all of this year’s rewatches? Except I’ve already messed up such a plan by not doing it for the first one (The Greatest Showman, which I previously watched in 2018), so maybe I won’t bother.
  • Quatermass and the Pit is the first Series Progression film this year that isn’t from the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series. Will they make up 50% of that category this year, or will it be more by the time I’m done? The next four months will, of course, tell.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS films were surreal Japanese drama/thriller/horror (it doesn’t often get branded a horror, but I thought it was one), Woman in the Dunes; and also kinda Japanese, but also Russian, in that it was directed by Akira Kurosawa but was funded by Russia and is in Russian and was made for Russians, Dersu Uzala.
  • No Blindspot film this month — I concentrated on getting WDYMYHS up to the same level instead.
  • From last month’s “failures” I only watched The Singing Ringing Tree.



The 135th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
My pick for film of the month came right at the end: Hammer’s third big-screen adaptation of a BBC TV Quatermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, which is more driven by sci-fi ideas than you might expect of a ’60s flick from a studio renowned for their lurid horror.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Fitting more in the stereotypes of its era, Robot Monster is pulp ’50s SF in all the worst ways. I only watched it because it was shot in 3D, and that’s actually moderately successful — it resists the urge to poke stuff at the camera, as you’d expect from such a schlocky effort, but instead offers reasonable depth and dimensionality, and even a couple of sequences that play with ideas like showing different images to each eye.


September will need to be my most film-filled month of the year if I’m to even stand a chance of getting to #100 in December. But I’ve bought myself that extra time rather than it already feeling impossible, so that’s something.