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.

Obviously, the real failure this January lay in not watching very many films of any kind at all; not least things like Blindspot and WDYMYHS, for which I’m supposed to watch one a month, every month. Still, rather than dwell on that, let’s look at what hit cinemas: as usual for January, a trickle of 2025 releases still making their way to the UK, and 2026 newcomers making their flashy debut. The former was headlined by major awards season contender Hamnet, while the latter included horror sequel-cum-fourquel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and poorly-reviewed AI sci-fi Mercy.

A lot of other titles seemed to focus on bringing true stories to the screen: Steve Coogan-starring football drama Saipan (not my cup of tea at all, but it had a wide release so I feel I should mention it); unlikely John Bishop-inspired non-biopic Is This Thing On? (as I understand it, it’s ‘based on’ his life story rather than claiming to be it); Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as a Neil Diamond tribute band in Song Sung Blue; and more sport with the story of boxer Naseem Hamed in Giant. We also seem to get horror moves year-round nowadays, and as well as the 28 Years Later sequel, January gave us video game adaptation Return to Silent Hill… oh, look, I’m even less likely to watch the others, so why mention them?

Over on the streamers, attempts were made to leverage star power by both Netflix — The Rip, starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon — and Prime Video — The Wrecking Crew, starring Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa (presented by Hyundai, as the advert on my Fire Stick practically screams. I like the idea I’ll buy something as expensive as a car just because it’s slapped its name on a movie, but hey, that’s always been an oddity of sponsorship).

Elsewise in terms of vaguely brand-new stuff, it was theatrical releases of varying degrees of significance making their subscription streaming debuts and/or moving to a new streamer (I can never remember what’s what for some relatively-new titles). The frontrunner for these was, as ever, Sky Cinema / NOW offering 28 Years Later (perfect timing), The Ballad of Wallis Island, Nuremberg, and a bunch of new versions of IPs — again, of varying degrees of significance; everything from the well-received Liam Neeson-starring The Naked Gun to The Toxic Avenger via another attempt at Smurfs (or, as many of the posters would seem to have it, Rihanna is Smurfette: Smurfs). In a similar ballpark was TRON: Ares on Disney+ and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire on Netflix, though the latter also gained Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck and Diablo Cody (remember her?) scripted Lisa Frankenstein. Prime led with John Wick spinoff Ballerina, plus fantasy adventure The Legend of Ochi.

Digging deeper, Amazon somewhat make up for that relatively thin offering by being the only major streamer that sometimes pulling out more interesting back catalogue additions. I mean, can you imagine Netflix plumping for Billy Wilder’s Avanti, Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha, or Federico Fellini’s La Strada? Sure, they also get bogged down with the likes of Point Break (both versions), Road House (both versions), Paul W.S. Anderson’s take on The Three Musketeers, and minor Guy Ritchie works like Revolver… but variety is the spice of life, or something. Besides, I could go on to list titles like Beasts of the Southern Wild, In Bruges, Paths of Glory, and Requiem for a Dream. They make some of this stuff a pain to find, but if you’re prepared to dig around a bit, Prime Video usually has more of the more surprising offerings, at least from the big-name streamers.

Still the best way to find the most interesting stuff is to turn to physical media. My purchases this month certainly tended more towards the esoteric, with the only high-profile brand-new acquisition being One Battle After Another. My feelings on Paul Thomas Anderson films swing around wildly, so I hope this is more of a Phantom Thread and less of a Punch Drunk Love. That’s not to say my other purchases were incredibly obscure — something like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is well known and, nowadays, well regarded, but it’s not the kind of thing you would’ve found selling out local multiplex within the last few months, either.

Any other month, my most ridiculously extravagant purchase would have been All the Anime’s edition of Macross Plus, which — alongside two discs containing, y’know, the film (and its original four-part series version) — boasts a 184-page book, a set of art cards, and a poster, all encased in Laserdisc-size packaging with a price tag to match (though I got it in their Christmas sale). But no, that was overshadowed by Imprint’s edition of Michael Mann’s The Keep, which comes not only with the usual array of ‘premium edition’ pack-ins like a poster, lobby card reproductions, and a book-length ‘booklet’, but also the full first-draft script, the original press kit, and an entire graphic novel adaptation — plus a solid-metal cross. It weights a ton, and cost one too.

And yet the p&p from Australia was free, because I ordered it alongside their lavish-but-not-that-lavish editions of erotic neo-noir The Last Seduction and Hammer’s Twins of Evil. And the aforementioned sale meant Macross Plus arrived accompanied by the trilogy of Patlabor: The Movie, Patlabor 2: The Movie, and WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3. To finish things off, the latest Masters of Cinema release: a double-bill of titles directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1999’s Charisma and 2024’s Cloud, which came with… a slipcase and a booklet. Funny how, once upon a time, that used to b enough to feel like a fairly lavish edition.