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About badblokebob

Aiming to watch at least 100 films in a year. Hence why I called my blog that. http://100films.co.uk

The Incendiary Monthly Review of September 2024

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I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you… this month’s films.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#67 Godzilla Minus One (2023) — Wildcard #3
#68 Incendies (2010) — WDYMYHS #8
#69 Desperado (1995) — Failure #9
#70 The Fall Guy (2024) — New Film #9
#71 Frozen II 3D (2019) — Wildcard #4
#72 The Batman (2022) — Wildcard #5
#73 Golem (1980) — Wildcard #6
#74 Cutthroat Island (1995) — Rewatch #9
#75 Rio Bravo (1959) — Blindspot #8


  • I watched 10 feature films I’d never seen before in September.
  • Eight of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
  • Four of those qualified as Wildcards. That’s… fine. I mean, I should’ve been watching Blindspot and WDYMYHS films instead, really, but at least I was watching something. I always intend to leave the Wildcards as late in the year as possible, because they’re considerably easier to cross off than some other categories; but I’m also not going to watch a film that could qualify and not count it just so the slot is left open to be filled later — that’s a different kind of madness.
  • I left it so long to watch Godzilla Minus One that I didn’t think it was going to qualify for my Challenge. Let’s walk through the categories. My “New Films” go by UK release date, but G-1 is a seemingly-rare example of a film that is foreign language and an Oscar nominee, but was actually released in the UK in its original year of release. It was on my WDYMYHS list when I published that in January, but has since dropped off the IMDb Top 250 so no longer counts. It was in both May and June’s “Failures” after being surprise dropped on Netflix on June 1st, but I wasn’t subscribed at the time (I’m, uh, still not) so I missed that. It also featured in August’s Failures, but technically that was the black-and-white version so it would sorta be cheating. I could have waited until the UK disc release delivered it onto the Failures for a fourth time, but I have a suspicion that won’t be out until December. There is a theatrical re-release coming in the interim, but that only works for qualification if it (a) screens for more than one night (I don’t think it actually did last time, at least not near me), and (b) it’s released one month and is still screening the next (to qualify as a “failure”, again). But, for all that, it does perennially qualify thanks to being on my 2023 “50 Unseen” list… but I used up all the slots in that category already… but that’s what Wildcards are for! Hurrah! (And whew!)
  • For some reason I thought I had one Series Progression slot left to go, and Frozen II was going to fill that slot. It wasn’t a fault in my record keeping, just in my memory. So, as a wildcard, Frozen II could’ve counted as either Series Progression (that series being the Disney Animated Canon) or 50 Unseen (it was on 2019’s list). I went with the former because, as I said, that’s what I thought I was doing; and also because I’ve already has a 50 Unseen wildcard, so let’s keep it mixed up.
  • I’d been trying to keep the Batman films on my List of Reviews page in some semblance of series order, though that was always made harder by the animated films taking place in various different chronologies, not to mention two-thirds of the Dark Knight trilogy not even beginning with the word “Batman”. Now, after The Batman, I’ve just given in and put it in full-on alphabetical order. That also doesn’t feel quite right (the four Burton+ live-action films are now scattered and out of sequence), but nothing’s perfect (except arguably strict chronological across all the films… but even that throws up oddities, like interrupting the aforementioned live-action run with 1993’s Mask of the Phantasm).
  • This month’s Blindspot film was Howard Hawks and John Wayne’s response to High Noon, Rio Bravo. It’s a good film, though (even setting aside political leanings) I thought High Noon was better.
  • No WDYMYHS film this month, meaning I’m two behind on both the Blindspot categories. That’s intentional for Blindspot itself (I’ve got two horror films on the list, so I intend to watch both of those in October), but WDYMYHS now just needs to be caught up on.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched Desperado, The Fall Guy, and Golem.



The 112th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Quite a few films I enjoyed this month, even though a couple fell a little short of my high hopes for them (said hopes were probably too high, but what can you do?) One that absolutely lived up to its billing was Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies — one of those films that’s truly gruelling, but also truly exceptional.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
One of the things about liking 3D is that I’ll watch almost anything in 3D, which is how I came to watch “nudie cutie” Adam and 6 Eves. It’s a 60-minute film that exists to primarily show off topless women, with some pun-laden narration because, I dunno, I guess someone thought if they made it funny it would somehow stop it being crass? It didn’t work; it just made it worse.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
Hey, would you look at that: I posted some actual film reviews! And one of them came out on top, too, with The Swordsman of All Swordsmen being my most-viewed post of the month. That said, it was only slightly ahead of the August monthly review; and the other new review post (Hepworth shorts) was way down the list. But if I was doing all this just for hits, I’d’ve given up a long time ago.



Every review posted this month, including new titles and the Archive 5


For some people, October is all about the horror movies. I always feel like I’ll go all-in on that too one year, but every time it rolls around I haven’t even considered that “one year” being this year. I do have a couple of seasonally-appropriate flicks I’ve been holding back for the occasion, though, so in 31 days we’ll see just how horrific my month gets.

Cecil M. Hepworth shorts

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I know I’m generally quite poor about posting reviews nowadays (“nowadays” being “for the past five years”, considering that’s roughly how long ago my backlog stretches), but I do have the Archive 5 to dig into that, and sometimes post reviews of newer watches too. What really suffers, however, are short films. I have no consistent plan to correct that, but here at least are reviews of three shorts I’ve watched this year with a simple connection: they were all directed by early British filmmaker Cecil M. Hepworth.

  • Alice in Wonderland (1903)
  • Explosion of a Motor Car (1900)
  • The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder (1901)

    Alice in Wonderland

    (1903)

    Cecil M. Hepworth & Percy Stow | 9 mins | digital HD | 4:3 | UK / silent

    The first screen adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s beloved novel is a whistle-stop tour of some of its best-known moments. What it loses in not being able to retain any of Carroll’s memorable prose or dialogue, it makes up for by being a neat showcase for some early-cinema special effects — Alice shrinks and grows; a baby turns into a pig; and so on. There’s little doubt that this isn’t the best filmed version of the tale (unless you have a fondness for early cinema over anything made later), but it’s a valuable glimpse into the ambition and skill of the form’s pioneers.

    The only surviving print is in terrible shape and missing several minutes of footage (it was originally 12 minutes long), but at least we have some way of seeing this important bit of film history. Talking of which, you can watch it on the BFI’s official YouTube channel, although they only provide it in standard definition. Fortunately, there’s a full HD version here.

    3 out of 5

    Explosion of a Motor Car

    (1900)

    Cecil M. Hepworth | 2 mins | digital SD | 4:3 | UK / silent

    Cars randomly exploding for almost no reason is a hallmark of action cinema, but it begins even earlier than the codification of that genre, as this short from 1900 shows.

    We watch as a car full of people merrily trundles along a suburban street… then, suddenly, there’s a puff of smoke and the vehicle is reduced to a pile of parts. A policeman comes over to inspect, at which point body parts rain from the sky. It would be gruesome if it weren’t so obviously comical… especially when the policeman begins to casually pile them up. And that’s the end.

    Basically, it’s a comedy sketch à la 1900. I guess it was probably inspired by fears of this modern new invention, the motor car, but at least it plays those for laughs. There are worse ways to spend 90-or-so seconds (depending on the playback speed of the version you watch — the BFI version is here).

    3 out of 5

    The Indian Chief and
    the Seidlitz Powder

    (1901)

    Cecil M. Hepworth | 2 mins | digital SD | 4:3 | UK / silent

    So, I bought the 88 Films Blu-ray of ’70s British-produced Western Hannie Caulder (mentioned in my May failures), had a little look at the booklet and, for whatever reason, the opening paragraph of the essay by Lee Broughton caught my eye. To quote: “The British have been making Westerns since the early days of silent cinema (see The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder [Cecil M. Hepworth, 1901]) and they continue to make Westerns today (see The English [Hugo Blick, 2022]).” This, first off, reminded me that I’d meant to watch The English (I find Blick’s work to be both fascinating and somehow off-putting, so I always feel I should watch them but, when there’s such a plethora of choice nowadays, it’s easier to go for something, well, easier). More relevantly, it sent me off to Google this short, having recognised the director’s name (partly from watching the above-reviewed shorts a couple of months earlier) and, more importantly, being interested in the early days of cinema — especially as shorts such as these can usually be found online, if they survive. You often end up with low-quality DVD rips on YouTube, but, thankfully, this one is available on the BFI for free.

    All of that said, it’s… not all that. It’s a Western in technicality only: the sole character is a Native American chief; though you’d only infer that from the title, because his costume is terrible. There are no other signifiers that this is a Western — the basic set could be a store or storeroom anywhere, and presumably Seidlitz Powder was a product sold in British shops. I presume that because the short is a one-gag comedy based around the effects of that product, and so British audiences must’ve known about it. As far as I’m aware, it’s not a product still in existence today, so thank goodness for the BFI’s explanatory notes (also at the link above) to illuminate the context of the joke.

    Other than that, the film is noteworthy for containing a sequence in slow motion. It’s an inherently cinematic effect, so it’s always interesting to see it deployed so early in the form’s history. Indeed, it stands at odds with how the other ‘effects’ in the film are achieved: the chief’s belly swells by the performer (Hepworth himself, possibly? I don’t know, but I believe he often appeared in his own films; equally, someone is operating the camera) fiddling around inside his costume and shaking it about until it inflates. Then he “bounce[s] around like a balloon”, says the BFI — rather overselling it, as he just kind of leaps about a bit. There is one more cinematic technique: a jump cut to allow for a puff of smoke when his stomach bursts… followed by the performer awkwardly folding up his now over-large costume before darting out the door.

    So, two minutes filled with casual racism, 120-year-old topical humour, and some weak theatrical ‘special’ effects. But hey, at least we can experience British cinema’s early forays into uniquely cinematic technique and a key genre.

    2 out of 5

    • The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968)

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    aka Yi dai jian wang

    Joseph Kuo | 86 mins | Blu-ray | 2.35:1 | Taiwan / Mandarin | 12

    The Swordsman of All Swordsmen

    Revenge is a dish best served cold, according to the Klingons, and Tsai Ying-jie (Tien Peng) is the embodiment of that mantra. As a young child, he witnessed his whole family murdered by group of assassins who wanted his father’s legendary sword. As an adult, he’s a fully-trained expert swordsman, and the time has come for vengeance. As word of his victories spreads, he’s intercepted by Flying Swallow (Polly Shang-Kuan Ling-Feng), who tries to persuade him off his murderous path, and Black Dragon (Chiang Nan), who seeks to cement his reputation as the foremost swordsman by defeating Tsai in combat.

    It’s pretty standard fare as wuxia plots go — I suspect that was as much the case in 1968 as it is today — but the art, as is so often the case, lies in the execution. Director (and co-writer) Joseph Kuo hits the ground running: we meet Tsai as he arrives in the town of his first target, and just minutes later they’re duelling. His motivations are only then revealed via flashback. The film runs a tight 85 minutes, and in that time manages to pack in seven sword fights and still find room for some honour-based moral conflict. The action comes thick and fast (that’s an average of a fresh duel starting every 12 minutes, maths fans) but remains thrilling throughout. That said, I do love a good sword fight, so I’m somewhat biased. While some of the direction almost borders on perfunctory (it’s fine, but nothing remarkable), other parts are glorious — the fights, in particular; and the finale, especially, is quite gorgeous.

    Swordsmen, swordswoman, swordspeople

    In between the action, the film pauses to consider the morals. It’s hardly a think-piece, but it does make a reasonable thematic argument against generational conflict… although Flying Swallow only tries to convince our hero to alter his course after he’s already taken revenge on four out of five targets, so it does come across as too little too late. Still, it matters because honour and rightness are major concerns in films like this, and those considerations have a key role in how the final two bouts play out. Kuo’s background was in romances and melodramas (before the success of King Hu’s Dragon Inn caused the Taiwanese film industry to shift focus), so perhaps he brought a greater understanding — certainly, a greater interest — in human emotion to the film than you’d get from your run-of-the-mill combat junkie. That the film doesn’t have excessive time to spend navel gazing means these quandaries add to the texture, rather than overwhelming it or making us feel too guilty for enjoying the spectacle of clashing blades.

    Eureka’s blurb notes this is the first part of a trilogy about Tsai Ying-jie, followed by The Bravest Revenge and The Ghost Hill. They sound pretty cool and borderline insane (the third apparently involves Tsai and Swallow going to Hell), though Kuo wasn’t involved in them (contrary to what Eureka’s blurb claims). Still, I’d welcome Eureka bringing them to disc too.

    4 out of 5

    The Swordsman of All Swordsmen is the 66th film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024. It was my Favourite Film of the Month in August 2024. It placed 13th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2024.

    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.

    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.

    The Wicked Little Monthly Review of August 2024

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    In the spirit of “littleness”, I don’t have any great or insightful or amusing intro ideas for this month, so let’s just dive on in…



    This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

    #59 Scenes from a Marriage (1974) — Blindspot #7
    #60 Robot Dreams (2023) — New Film #8
    #61 The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) — Failure #7
    #62 Road to Bali (1952) — Series Progression #9
    #63 Clue of the Silver Key (1961) — Series Progression #10
    #64 Hamilton (2020) — Rewatch #8
    #65 Wicked Little Letters (2023) — Wildcard #2
    #66 The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (1968) — Genre #6


    • I watched 11 feature films I’d never seen before in August.
    • Six of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with two rewatches.
    • That leaves me bang on target with the Challenge, which is slightly better than this time last year — which is good, because things only got worse month by month last time.
    • This post’s namesake, Wicked Little Letters, could’ve qualified as a wildcard on two fronts: as an additional New Film or an additional Failure. It doesn’t really matter which I class it as, but because it was a Failure in both February and July (and as one festival screening makes it, on most listings, a 2023 film rather than a 2024 one), it felt more fitting to designate it an additional Failure.
    • This month’s Blindspot film was Scenes from a Marriage. I should’ve watched two to get fully caught up, but (as discussed last month) I’m intentionally putting off that double-bill until October (let’s hope that pans out!)
    • No WDYMYHS film this month. I had a few days at the end of the month where I intended to get one in and, you know, I just didn’t feel like any of them. That’s just how it goes sometimes. I feel like that’s ok when I’ve still got a whole third of the year left to get caught up. That said, out of the past five runs of Blindspot/WDYMYHS I’ve only succeeded once, so maybe I should take the task a little more seriously.
    • From last month’s “failures” I watched Wicked Little Letters and rewatched The Man from U.N.C.L.E..



    The 111th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

    Favourite Film of the Month
    At either end of this month’s viewing sit the two best (new) films I saw this month. Now, I should probably pick the “insight into the human condition”-packed Bergman film, but, you see, that movie doesn’t have any sword fights, whereas The Swordsman of All Swordsmen has seven really good ones. Sorry, Ingmar.

    Least Favourite Film of the Month
    I expected Save the Cinema to be a pleasantly quirky British true story kinda film — a sort-of genre we seem to have specialised in for the past couple of decades — and it is, kinda… but it also feels like an imitation of one, where it’s going through the expected motions but doesn’t properly hang together in its own right. Shame.

    The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
    No reviews again this month (at this point you’d be more surprised if there had been, right?), so once again it’s a two-way battle between the monthly review and failures. The victor, by a considerable margin — and, somewhat intriguingly, continuing the alternating pattern that’s been going on since April — is July’s monthly review. Will the failures win again next month? Will there actually be some reviews in contention? Find out in 30 days’ time…


    Summer’s over, here comes autumn. I know that kind of thinking depresses many people, but I welcome it. Heck, it’ll be Christmas before we know it. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves — I’ve still got 34 films left to go in my challenge, after all.

    July’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.

    The current big news on the big screen is undoubtedly Deadpool & Wolverine, which I might have actually gone to see if I hadn’t been busy this past weekend. Social media reaction seems divided: the fanboys love it (of course they do), while more serious-minded critics are cautious bordering on negative. I might still make the effort this coming weekend, or it might join the long list of post-Endgame MCU titles I just haven’t got round to. The fact it’s something oaan capstone to the Fox era of superhero movies sways me more in its favour, but still, we’ll see.

    Also filling multiplexes were routine animated sequel Despicable Me 4 and belated, nostalgia-fuelled blockbuster sequel Twisters. I’ll inevitably catch both eventually, but I still haven’t seen the last Minions film and it took me a couple of decades to get round to the first Twister — which is no more than a perfectly adequate film — so I’m hardly in a rush. Of more interest are Kill, an Indian action film that I’ve heard is very good (to the extent that John Wick’s Chad Stahelski is already working on a US remake), and I Saw the TV Glow, which feels like it’s been attracting praise on Letterboxd forever but has only now made it to UK screens. Nonetheless, I’ll wait for discs on both of those (not least my local isn’t screening them). And further down my future watchlist, a pair of horrors: Longlegs, which seems to have provoked a lot of chatter, mainly about Nic Cage’s performance, which makes it interesting to me; and MaXXXine, but I’ve not seen X or Pearl yet so that one’s a ways down the list.

    In theatrical-adjacent news, Amazon Prime Video finally brought Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to the UK. All of Ritchie’s films seem to go direct to Amazon here these days, for good or ill. It’s a bit of a coin-toss whether I’ll get round to it anytime soon or not, but it’s definitely on the watchlist. Amazon seemed to be leading the way with original premieres this month, also debuting sequel My Spy: The Eternal City (I never caved to watching the original, even during the pandemic, so this is hardly a priority for me) and Space Cadet (this sounds kinda like “Legally Blonde in space”, which mildly tempts me, but reviews are terrible). All I have noted down for Netflix, on the other hand, is original anime The Imaginary. Sky / NOW also got in on the action with a modern-day kid-friendly spin on the Robin Hood legend, Robin and the Hoods; while I do believe Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea had some kind of theatrical release, but it was so limited that its Disney+ debut is basically a premiere.

    Other films making their way to streaming post-theatrical included Wicked Little Letters on Netflix, which looks fun; The Iron Claw on Amazon, which seemed to attract positive buzz when it was in US cinemas; and on Sky / NOW, box office surprise smash romcom Anyone But You, the musical remake of Mean Girls, and Chinese animation (that I saw recommended somewhere) Deep Sea. Also Jericho Ridge, which I’d not heard of before it popped up on NOW, but its Assault on Precinct 13-esque premise sounded neat. And I don’t imagine it had a theatrical release, but it’s out on disc, so Amazon saved me having to pay for Bruceploitation (i.e. Bruce Lee exploitation) documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce. I say “saved” — that’s relative to me actually watching it before it’s inevitably removed one day…

    There were back catalogue comings and goings a-go-go, of course, though what caught my eye this month was a large vein of things I’ve upgraded to 4K on disc but not (re)watched yet. Those included (deep breath) The Babadook, Black Hawk Down, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Deep Impact, Dr Who and the Daleks and its sequel, Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, Drive, Enter the Dragon, the original Ghost in the Shell, Gladiator (really should revisit that before its sequel lands), The Green Mile, The Revenant, RoboCop (more on that later), RoboCop 2 (that too), The Shawshank Redemption, Top Gun: Maverick (which I also should’ve reviewed by now), and Training Day. Not to mention all the stuff I’ve just straight up bought on 4K and not watched yet, like Elvis, Possessor, The Sisters Brothers, and The Batman (it’s absolutely ridiculous that I still haven’t watched that). I expect I could generate a similarly lengthy list of films I own on unwatched Blu-rays that are now ‘free’ on streaming — though one that did stand out to me was Gravity, because it’s currently on both Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer and it reminded me I’ve never watched it in 3D, despite owning a 3D TV for over seven years now. Same goes for Dredd (which was streaming on Channel 4 this month) and… well, plenty of other things (that aren’t currently streaming; and probably some that are).

    None of which stops me buying piles of new discs, of course, including several that could feature in the above list — indeed, two do: RoboCop, which I finally picked up in Arrow’s recent sale; and the recently-released RoboCop 2 (from the US, because I did one of my bulk orders again). Other upgrades thanks to the Arrow sale included Time Bandits (it would’ve been neat to watch that before the new TV version started, wouldn’t it?) and Videodrome; while other 4Ks in that US order included giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris, an upgrade all the way from DVD for The Departed, and Criterion editions of I Am Cuba, McCabe & Mrs Miller, and The Red Shoes.

    Back in the UK, 4K new releases included both brand-new titles like Alex Garland’s Civil War and Dev Patel’s Monkey Man (both of which I’m keen to see, so it’s daft they’re having to be featured here), plus new releases for older titles, like Second Sight’s A Bittersweet Life, Indicator’s Bruiser (which means I now own all of George A Romero’s feature films in HD or 4K), Arrow’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Curzon’s Memories of Murder.

    Comparatively, I have very few regular ol’ HD titles to note. From Radiance’s latest slate, I limited myself to just Tai Kato’s Eighteen Years in Prison (yes, this is me trying to cut back), plus their partner label Raro Video’s release of Michael “Witchfinder General” Reeves’s Revenge of the Blood Beast (more commonly known online as The She Beast). I also finally upgraded classic TV series The Prisoner to HD, importing the recent Imprint release from Australia — it surely cost more than Network’s release would have back in the day, but that’s out of print (RIP Network) and at least this one comes with more special features (overall — it is missing a couple). Along with that, I finally stumped for an HD copy of the 2003 Zatoichi (there have been various releases, none of which seem to have the quite right PQ, but most of which do look better than my old DVD) and my most ridiculous purchase of the month, David Lynch’s Dune — ridiculous because I already own Arrow’s 4K release, but I bought this version for feature-length behind-the-scenes documentary The Sleeper Must Awaken: Making Dune. Was that a reasonable purchase? I guess it depends how good the doc is. I’ll have to actually watch it to find out.

    The Mysterious Monthly Review of July 2024

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    I know why you’re really here, dear reader. Films? Pfft! It’s for the latest update on how many hours of Critical Role I’ve watched, isn’t it?

    Well, even if it isn’t, totting that up sparked something of a mystery for me this month. I don’t feel like it’s been a particularly unusual 31 days, and yet my Critical Role-related viewing was less than half that of June, meaning it was even below what I watched in April and May (though not quite back down to where I started in March).

    Did that mean I reverted my viewing time to films? Nope! I’ve still only made it to ten new films this month (plus one rewatch for the Challenge), and even getting there included a little bit of a deliberate push over the last week. Perhaps it was TV, then? Well, I did watch a few classic Doctor Who serials — but even they only add up to about 7½ hours of viewing.

    So where did my time go instead of any obvious options? No idea! Probably wasted it on Twitter or something. This is why I continue to benefit from the existence of the Challenge: to motivate me to stop wasting my time.



    This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

    #50 Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024) — New Film #7
    #51 Like Stars on Earth (2007) — WDYMYHS #6
    #52 Alice (1988) —Failure #7
    #53 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) — 50 Unseen #10
    #54 Moana 3D (2016) — Rewatch #7
    #55 Kung Fu Hustle (2004) — Genre #5
    #56 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) — WDYMYHS #7
    #57 The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935) — Series Progression #8
    #58 Army of Shadows (1969) — Blindspot #6


    • I watched 10 feature films I’d never seen before in July.
    • Eight of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
    • With Mutant Mayhem, 50 Unseen becomes my first completed category of this year’s challenge. In the end, 7 out of 10 films were from 2023’s list — which is fine. I mean, it’d be nice to watch more from older lists too, but it’s no surprise that the most recent list gets more focus. (Of course, more 50 Unseen films may still qualify (indeed, I hope they will) in the Wildcard category.)
    • Conversely, Genre has only just reached the halfway point. But at least that’s not too far behind where it should be. And there’s only been one Wildcard, but then that’s partly their point (i.e. to still be around towards the end for maximum flexibility).
    • This month’s Blindspot film was the first I’ve seen directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, namely his French Resistance thriller Army of Shadows.
    • That means I’m still behind with Blindspot (having missed it in May, I’ve still got one to catch up). But I’m currently kind of ok with that, because I realised that I have two horror films on the list (Possession and Rosemary’s Baby) so, consequently, October would be the best month for a double dose.
    • I did catch up on WDYMYHS this month, though. Those films were Bollywood dyslexia drama Like Stars on Earth and three-hour post-war romantic melodrama — and Best Picture winner — The Best Years of Our Lives.
    • From last month’s “failures” I watched Alice.



    The 110th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

    Favourite Film of the Month
    A tight race between two excellent films from the end of the month, here, but I’m going to give the edge to Army of Shadows because… I don’t know, probably because I watched it most recently. Maybe if they were the other way round, The Best Years of Our Lives would’ve snagged it. They’re both great, anyway.

    Least Favourite Film of the Month
    No outright duds this month — arguably The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes came closest, but it’s mostly fine with flaws inherited from the source novel. The reason it’s not my pick here is that it was about what I expected it to be, whereas I’d been somewhat looking forward to Kung Fu Hustle for some time, but found it to be a little disappointing. There’s some good kung fu sequences, but a lot of the humour didn’t land for me and the narrative felt like too much of a shaggy dog story.

    The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
    Just two to choose from again this month (I really need to put some effort into reviews). The monthly review won last time; the time before was the failures; and the time before that was the monthly review again… This month, the pattern continues (or, you could argue, is properly established) thanks to a victory by June’s failures.


    Disc releases of big films from earlier in the year are beginning to come through now, so hopefully I’ll finally start catching up on all those films I sort of intended to see at the cinema but couldn’t be bothered to.

    June’s Failures

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    Somehow, Pixar returned. After it looked like Disney’s release strategy during the pandemic might have somehow killed off Pixar, this month they… proved it, with Inside Out 2 becoming the highest grossing film of the year so far. Will we ever see an original Pixar movie again, or just a never-ending parade of attempts to rehash former glories, aka sequels? The latter seems likely at present.

    Also on the big screen this past month: the fourth Bad Boys movie, whose ideal title was already taken by the third Bad Boys movie, so had to settle for Bad Boys: Ride or Die; more franchise fare in prequel A Quiet Place: Day One; the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s multi-part Western Horizon: An American Saga; the feature debut of M Night Shyamalan’s daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan, horror The Watched (aka The Watchers in the US, for whatever reason); another Russell Crowe exorcist movie, simply titled The Exorcism; new work from Yorgos Lanthimos with Kinds of Kindness and Jeff Nichols with The Bikeriders; plus various other bits and pieces I was even less likely to go and see.

    Almost getting my viewing time were Netflix and Amazon Prime’s main originals of the month, which share a titular theme — those being Hit Man and Poolman, respectively. Their reviews out of festivals couldn’t be more different (the former attracting so much praise that it was seen as a shame it was going direct to Netflix; the latter… less so), but both land relatively high on my watchlist (the former because it’s Richard Linklater; the latter because the trailer looked fun, actually). Also attracting positive word of mouth was animation Ultraman: Rising. I’ve never seen any Ultraman stuff — heck, I’ve paid so little attention to it as a franchise that I don’t even really know what it is — but apparently this new animated Netflix original is very good. Also premiering on that platform in the past few weeks was Under Paris (the film that should’ve been called Shark de Triomphe — not sure where I first saw that pun, but credit to everyone who thought of it) and, not an original, but given its truncated cinema run (at least in this country), it may as well have been: Godzilla Minus One. (Regular readers with strong memories may recall I already listed that last month, but it didn’t really belong there — and, more importantly, I still haven’t watched it — so here it is again). The most else Prime could muster was the delayed (it came out in the US back in March) debut of a thriller starring Russell Crowe and Karen Gillan, Sleeping Dogs, and home movie-based tennis doc Federer: Twelve Final Days.

    Meanwhile, my notes say Disney+ offered absolutely nothing new. And moving on to back catalogue titles, Disney+ offered… nothing there, either. Good thing I don’t pay for it.

    As for the others, the most recent releases went to Sky Cinema / NOW, as usual, with Meg 2: The Trench and Five Nights at Freddy’s, while Netflix provided the streaming debut for Jodie Comer-starring environmental disaster sci-fi The End We Start From, as well as picking up the likes of Beast (the “Idris Elba vs a lion” film) and Bodies Bodies Bodies from Sky. Other titles of particular note included, on iPlayer, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All and acclaimed animation Flee; on Channel 4, The Forever Purge reminded me I quite enjoyed the first two films in that franchise and still need to catch up with the rest; and MUBI proffered Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (as in “in Wonderland”), Bong Joon-ho’s short Incoherence (included on the Criterion release of Memories of Murder, but I’ve just plumped for the UK 4K instead), and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which would be more noteworthy if I hadn’t bought the new 4K release just last month.

    For whatever reason, The Dreamers also popped up on Prime this month; indeed, more than usual, they seemed to specialise in films I own on disc but haven’t watched, both ones I’ve never and those I’ve upgraded but not rewatched yet. Other examples included Children of Men, A Few Good Men, JFK, Peter Jackson’s King Kong (I’ve owned multiple versions down the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the extended cut), Kwaidan, Ridley Scott’s Legend, The Long Good Friday, Requiem for a Dream, Schindler’s List… and more. Indeed, as always, there were far too many catalogue additions across all the streamers to get into listing here.

    With so many old discs waiting to be watched, I should really try to slow down my acquisition of new ones. I can’t say that I have, though this month’s pile feels a little lighter than usual. Recent theatrical releases new to disc included Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (it may have been poorly reviewed but, eh, I liked the last one) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (one I kinda regret not seeing on the big screen, but here we are). Both of those were in 4K UHD, of course, on which format I also picked up 88 Films’ releases of Jess Franco’s Count Dracula and Jet Li classic Fist of Legend (which I reviewed, dubbed, way back in 2008. I enjoyed it even in that bastardised form, so it will be nice to revisit it properly). On regular Blu-ray, more of my money went into 88’s pockets for action/horror The Holy Virgin Versus the Evil Dead and historical epic Hsi Shih: Beauty of Beauties, while Radiance claimed yet more of my cash with sale pickups The Dead Mother and Scream and Scream Again, and their new release of Kinji Fukasaku’s Sympathy for the Underdog.

    And, um, that’s it! Said it was a light one.

    The Sunny Monthly Review of June 2024

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    We’ve been experiencing a patch of seasonal weather for a change here in the UK, hence the adjective in the title of this month’s review. For some people, such weather might affect their film viewing — getting out while it’s nice and all that. Not me, though — I prefer the colder, winterier weather myself.

    Not that staying inside in the cool has done anything to help my film viewing either, mind. It might have done, were it not for my Critical Role addiction continuing to get implausibly stronger: this month it ratcheted up to over 74 hours of my viewing time. During that, I crossed the quarter-way mark of Campaign 2, which made me realise just how long it’s going to take to catch up at my average pace so far (literally years), so that might explain why I watched quite so much this month — some futile attempt to speed that along. “Futile” because, even if I kept up 74 hours a month from now on, it would still take me roughly 16 months to get in pace with new episodes. So maybe I’ll ease off. Or, who knows, maybe I really will watch three solid days’ worth every month until the end of 2025…



    This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

    #43 Man at the Carlton Tower (1961) — Series Progression #7
    #44 Sleepless in Seattle (1993) — Rewatch #6
    #45 Argylle (2024) — New Film #6
    #46 Fast X (2023) — 50 Unseen #9
    #47 Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) — Failure #6
    #48 A Separation (2011) — WDYMYHS #5
    #49 Yi Yi (2000) — Blindspot #5


    • I watched ten feature films I’d never seen before in June.
    • Six of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
    • The end of June is halfway through the year, of course, so only being on #49 makes it look like I’m behind; but the months are longer in the second half of the year, on average, so #50 isn’t actually ‘due’ until about July 2nd. I had hoped to get to #50 this month nonetheless, but things didn’t quite work out.
    • Also not working out as planned this month: Blindspot and WDYMYHS. After failing both last month, I should’ve watched two of each to catch up, but didn’t. On the bright side, I did get them both ticking over; coupled with the fact I’m still on target overall, that’s not too concerning — yet. I’ll try again next month.
    • So, this month’s Blindspot film was Edward Yang’s Yi Yi — I finally watched it after three years on the list (sort of: it was on 2022’s list and 2023’s allowed wildcards). It’s hard to say if it lived up to the hype when the hype is so large, but it’s certainly very good.
    • And this month’s WDYMYHS film was Iranian relationship drama (that turned out to not really be a relationship drama after all; at least not primarily) A Separation.
    • From last month’s “failures” I watched Four Flies on Grey Velvet (though via a UHD download I already had, rather than the Prime Video appearance that earnt its place on the failures list).



    The 109th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

    Favourite Film of the Month
    The past few days I’ve been feeling like I haven’t seen a film I truly loved for ages and, looking back over June’s viewing for this category, I can see that feeling isn’t exactly wrong. There were some I admired this month though, most of all Yi Yi. I wouldn’t bank on anything from June making my year-end best-of list, mind. That said, it’s not been a stellar year all round, so if thing’s don’t pick up…

    Least Favourite Film of the Month
    On the other hand, it’s not exactly been bad — I have most of my viewing from this month down for a 3 (when I finally get round to posting reviews). Aside from a couple of 4s (and Yi Yi may yet nudge a 5 on reflection), the only outlier is Fast X — I may yet decide that only deserves a 2.

    The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
    No reviews this month (oops), so the contenders here are limited to just the two posts from the start of the month. Of those, May’s monthly review triumphed with 77% more views than May’s failures.


    No predictions (other than “more Critical Role”), but I’m now beginning to amass movies I missed earlier in 2024 on disc, so I ought to pay attention to those, really. (More details on which movies those are exactly in the failures post, which would normally land tomorrow but might be a day or two late this month.)

    May’s Failures

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    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…