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March’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.

Project Hail Mary merits a mention right off the bat, as the Ryan Gosling-starring sci-fi adaptation is apparently the highest-grossing film of the year so far. I’m sure there’ll be a kids’ animation along at some point to overtake that, but it remains noteworthy for the time being. I heard somewhere that there’s a twist and/or twists that are better unspoiled, so I’ve not read a whole lot about it… not that I read much about any new releases nowadays, to be honest. A lot of my understanding of “significance” nowadays is wholly vibes based on what I pick up or overhear here and there.

And in that spirit, other films of note on the big screen — at least as far as I’m aware — include a new Pixar, Hoppers. Obviously they’re a studio rather than a franchise, so I don’t know that I really need to “catch up” on their output, but nonetheless, that now makes eight Pixar films I need to catch up on. Sticking to family movies, Enid Blyton adaptation The Magic Faraway Tree seems to be one of those films that has crossed over to ‘regular people’ (certainly, work colleagues have talked about it, and they almost never talk about films). The other perennial big screen success story is horror, which this month has a somewhat comedic bent (as far as I can tell) between Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on Frankenstein, The Bride!, and sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. While I have other releases noted down, I know even less about them than the ones I’ve already mentioned, so can do little more than reel off their titles: Mother’s Pride, Reminders of Him, Dead Man’s Wire, Midwinter Break, Arco, Splitsville, They Will Kill You…

Plus, straddling the cinema / streaming original divide, the return of a certain Birmingham-based crime saga in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, the popularity of which meant it managed to attract some press for its limited theatrical release (more than most cinema-bound Netflix titles seem to manage) before debuting on Netflix later in the month. Rather than watch that, I finally got round to the sixth series of the show itself. Strong chance the film crops up in my April viewing, then.

The only other direct-to-streaming premiere I have noted down for last month is another Netflix original, War Machine, although they did debut I Swear shortly after it provoked all that controversy at the BAFTAs, so that’s probably more noteworthy. I don’t even have any such streaming premieres noted down for Amazon Prime Video, so either they had a barren March or their offering entirely passed me by. NOW led the way in that regard, as usual, with the likes of Nobody 2 and Materialists, before ending the month with Best Picture victor One Battle After Another. And, as if to bring us full circle back to the high grossers, Disney+ rustled up last year’s big box office winner, Zootropolis 2.

Prime did continue to do what they do best, however, which is cycle through a tonne of back catalogue stuff. Ones that caught my eye this past month included Luc Besson’s The Big Blue, demonic Keanu Reeves / Al Pacino legal drama The Devil’s Advocate, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, and a couple of silents in the form of the 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and the Douglas Fairbanks iteration of The Three Musketeers. Similarly, iPlayer proffered Aftersun (I suppose it must leave iPlayer sometimes so that it can come back), Jodie Comer-starring eco-thriller The End We Start From, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza… plus a whole bunch of other stuff, across both of them, but (as always) if I were to list everything we’d be here forever.

But, for my traditional segue into all the new Blu-rays I bought this month, here’s some stuff I already own on disc that popped up — both things I’ve never seen and stuff that’s overdue a rewatch. On Netflix, Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Sleepy Hollow. On Prime, The Chronicles of Riddick, Crimson Peak, The Dreamers, The Last Samurai, The Silence of the Lambs, and Unforgiven. On iPlayer, Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, The Martian, Master and Commander, The Third Man, Training Day, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, How the West Was Won, which I remember buying as one of my first-ever Blu-rays to show off the format. I wonder how that disc holds up today? Maybe someday I’ll actually watch it and find out…

My bank balance would like it if such a backlog compelled me to stop buying new releases. Alas, I am weak-willed, and so this month I splashed out on another veritable pile of discs. The headliner for me was John Woo’s action classic Hard Boiled. At one point it looked like this was a film we’d never see on disc again, and now we have it in what is reportedly a beautiful 4K restoration. Between titles like that (and its label brethren, such as The Killer, coming in April) and the Doctor Who TV movie also restored in 4K, 2026 is shaping up to be a year of ‘impossible’ releases. Heck, you can throw Stranger Things getting a complete series physical release in that category, too.

Otherwise, there was a surprising horror bent to this month’s acquisitions, between Hammer’s Fear in the Night from StudioCanal, the original adaptation of Salem’s Lot from Arrow, French classic The Devil’s Hand from Masters of Cinema, and a new UK 4K of the original Suspiria; plus I also picked up the Warners Archive editions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both 1931 and 1941 versions, replacing an old DVD double-bill. Even the non-horror titles sound kind of horror-y, like Stolen Face (another from famously horror-centric studio Hammer, but billed as a “macabre melodrama”), or Radiance’s yakuza drama Blood of Revenge (putting “blood” in the title immediately evokes horror flicks, no?), or Masters of Cinema’s Cruel Tale of Bushido (what films are “cruel” if not horror?) Well, maybe I’m stretching a point, I don’t know.

There was one more Hammer title, in another genre again: ’50s sci-fi Spaceways. I don’t know if their current release schedule is deliberately designed to remind / inform us that Hammer did more than just the horror pictures for which they’re primarily remembered, but it feels like that might be the goal. Sticking with sci-fi, I belatedly picked up the 4K of Minority Report (it only came out in February, but I feel like I’m late to the party if I haven’t preordered something, or at least bought it during release week), plus Edgar Wright’s re-adaptation of The Running Man, the only brand-new film in this month’s selection. Rounding things out, a bevy of martial arts films, from Eureka’s The Invincible Eight to Arrow’s box set of Eiichi Kudo’s Samurai Revolution Trilogy.

These kinds of releases — all the things I’ve bought, really — get me excited when I read about them and place my order. Someday I need to translate that excitement into actually watching more of them.

The 20th Monthly Review of March 2026

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I ended last month’s review with a note of hope that the progress of 2026’s Challenge was at a tipping point; that things would imminently improve.

Reader, they did not.

Well, technically they did a bit — March has the most Challenge films of any month this year so far — but it wasn’t enough to consider me ‘back on track’. Why is this year going so poorly? What have I been doing instead of watching films? Well, it’s certainly true that I continue to spend leisure time on other things as well (books, games, TV), but I was also doing that last year. Am I choosing those more often than films now? I guess I must be. Still, it never feels like there’s enough time for any of it. Somehow, days just evaporate.

Anyway, let’s get into the detail of how things are going on the film front.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#8 Different from the Others (1919) — Blindspot #1
#9 PK (2014) — WDYMYHS #1
#10 Kung Fu Panda 4 3D (2024) — Failure #3
#11 This is Spinal Tap (1984) — Rewatch #2
#12 The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025) — 50 Unseen #1


  • I watched four feature films I’d never seen before in March.
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
  • I should have reached #24 by the end of March to be on target, so I’ve only watched 50% of the Challenge films that I should have by this point.
  • Kung Fu Panda 4 is my first 3D film this year, but doesn’t count towards my 3D Challenge category because it’s not classic 3D — by which I mean old rather than, y’know, A Classic. Not that it’s the latter either. But it is older than I thought: it came out two years ago! Where does time go?!
  • Talking of time disappearing, I first and last watched Spinal Tap in 2007 (as #15 that year, to be precise) and the receipt in my Blu-ray copy tells me I bought it in 2011, so I’ve been meaning to rewatch it for at least 15 years. These are the kind of ridiculous timescales I operate on. While I liked it back then, I loved it now, so maybe the wait wasn’t such a bad thing.
  • This month’s Blindspot film was the oldest on the list: Different from the Others. And not just old but historically important, being one of the earliest films to openly engage with themes of homosexuality.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS film was comedic sci-fi / religious satire PK.
  • From last month’s “failures” I only watched Kung Fu Panda 4.



The 130th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
These categories feel a little meaningless this year, when the pool of ‘nominees’ is so slim every month. Nonetheless, The Ballad of Wallis Island is a good film — much funnier than I was expecting, while still hitting home with it’s more dramatic parts.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Nothing outright bad this month, although several sit in the middle of the road. However, perhaps the least enjoyable viewing experience was Different from the Others. It’s an historically significant film and undoubtedly worthwhile for that reason, but huge chunks of it are missing, and even with photos and title cards to plug the plot gaps, it’s quite a disjointed watch.


Join me for the next instalment of the 48 Films in a Year Challenge!

…doesn’t have the same ring, does it? But it’s the current trajectory. That said, 88 films in 9 months works out at under 10 films per month on average, and 10 new films + 1 rewatch has been my monthly goal for a long time — and I’ve achieved it more months than not (before this year, anyway). In other words: hope remains that 2026 will turn out alright.

February’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 may be the shortest month of the year, and not exactly a time known for its hot box office release dates either, but my list of things I skipped on the big screen is surprisingly long this month. That said, a lot of them feel like smaller titles rather than headline grabbers. Exceptions include Emerald Fennel’s take on Wuthering Heights and the controversy-soaked Scream 7, plus awards season contenders like The Secret Agent and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You making their way to UK screens. Others that stood out to me for one reason or another included Sam Raimi’s Send Help, heist thriller Crime 101, and Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Look for them again as “films I failed to watch on streaming services” later this year, I guess.

A weak theatrical slate can be counterbalanced by streaming originals, especially at times of year with stay-at-home weather, but either I missed whatever the streamers were attempting to push this month or cared so little I didn’t even note it down. The only brand-new release I have listed is Prime Video’s piratical actioner The Bluff, which I may well watch because, well, pirates. The slack is barely taken up by former theatrical releases making their subscription streaming debuts, although I suppose Sky Cinema’s offering of the live-action How to Train Your Dragon and Jurassic World Rebirth is not insignificant. Nonetheless, I only have one apiece noted down from Disney+ (Ella McCay), Apple TV+ (Eternity), and Prime Video (Together), and nothing from Netflix but stuff shuffling around from one streamer to another (Abigail, The French Dispatch, Kung Fu Panda 4, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, etc).

Travelling further back in film history yields nothing from Netflix, as is typical, though it is something Amazon are always surprisingly good for, this month ranging from 8 Mile to Bob Hope comedy The Princess and the Pirate, via Neil “brother of Sean” Connery-starring Bond spoof Operation Kid Brother, and three titans of horror (Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing) co-starring in House of the Long Shadows. iPlayer is better in this regard, too, though they tend to cycle through the same set of films. Coming back into view this month were the likes of Bones and All, The Colditz Story, Malcolm X, Odette, Past Lives, and Women Talking.

Befitting their own paragraph were the many, many reminders of films I’ve bought on disc but not yet watched — David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, in addition to a couple already mentioned for other reasons. I’m not sure it’s better or worse that there are also plenty I bought to rewatch but have not got round to either, like The Fountain, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Miami Vice, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, which I haven’t seen since they were only on DVD, despite owning Blu-ray and 4K box sets (and the latter, especially, wasn’t cheap).

I guess I write these posts somewhat with the intention of shaming me into watching more stuff like that, but it obviously doesn’t work, does it? Nor does it stop me buying more, although this month it’s a short list by my standards. Sticking with rewatches, I insta-bought Criterion’s release of Birth. I normally try to wait out for sales with their titles (though their UK sales aren’t a patch on their US ones, and their US ones aren’t very accessible in the UK, so I actually haven’t bought much in them for a few years now), but Birth is a pretty great film, highly underrated, and long overdue a revisit. Also high on my want-to-rewatch list for some time now is Excalibur, which this month got a lavish 4K release from Arrow. It’s a film I feel I should adore, but haven’t quite on the couple of occasions I’ve seen it so far. I’m hoping one day it will click for me.

Those two labels also dominated by blind buys this month, with Errol Flynn swashbuckler Captain Blood from Criterion (I always feel like I should’ve seen more of those, but I’ve always found them surprisingly unavailable) and American Yakuza, Save the Green Planet, and (most excitingly, in my opinion) Peking Opera Blues from Arrow. Ever-reliable Eureka also got a look in with their Masters of Cinema box set Zen & Sword: The Miyamoto Musashi Saga at Toei, containing a five-film samurai sequence from the ’60s that they claim is the equal of my beloved Zatoichi. We’ll see. And finally, my one studio buy of the month: Predator: Badlands. That seemed a safe bet given how much I liked Dan Trachtenberg’s previous two films in that universe, both of which made it into one of my annual top tens (in 2022 and last year). No pressure, Badlands.

The 20th Monthly Review of February 2026

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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.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#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.



The 129th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

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.

January’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.

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.

The 20th Monthly Review of January 2026

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Strictly speaking, this is not the 20th January review — I didn’t start these monthly progress reports until 2010, which was my fourth year, so (factually) this is the 17th column of this nature. But it’s my 20th year, so what the hey!

I don’t know if that will make me more reflective throughout the year, but here’s one thing I’ve already observed: I was just 20 years old when I started this project, and this year I’ll turn 40. There’ll come a point before too long where 100 Films has been a part of my life longer than it hasn’t. I mean… crikey!

(Despite how close that makes it sound, “before too long” is actually the best part of two years away, in December 2027. Yes, I’ve put something in the diary.)

But, for now, it’s all about the past 31 days. Even after 20 years, they’ve set a new standard; broken a record, if you will. Unfortunately, it’s a bad record, and a new low standard. Oh dear…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#1 The Greatest Showman (2017) — Rewatch #1
#2 The Crime Is Mine (2023) — Wildcard #1
#3 The Roses (2025) — Failure #1


  • I watched two feature films I’d never seen before in January.
  • Both of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
  • That’s the weakest start to the year in the two-decade history of 100 Films — which is the new-low record I mentioned at the start.
  • As regular readers may remember, the monthly average needed to hit 100 on target is just over eight films per month, so I’m starting the year very much on the back foot.
  • But hey, it’s meant to be a challenge, right?
  • That said, I’m so far behind already that I think there’s a realistic prospect I won’t catch up to target until the final quarter of the year — especially as I suspect February won’t hit eight Challenge films either.
  • But hey, you never know, right?



The 128th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
So, there are only two films to choose from this month, which makes this not very much of a contest at all. Arguably it’s a bit ridiculous even doing it. But I still am, obviously. So, I give the edge to The Roses, probably just because its accurate evocation of British manners and humours clicked with me more.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
And that means the loser by default is The Crime Is Mine, which is, y’know, French. But I liked it a lot and would recommend it, so this might be the most “technicality loser” in the 128-month history of the Arbies.


February may be the shortest month of the year, but I hope it winds up with more films.

What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen All the Best* Sci-fi, Action, Adventure, Mystery, and Thriller Films?

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* According to IMDb Voters

What started out as my version of Blindspot (before someone else coined and popularised the term), I nowadays use as a secondary set of twelve films to watch in a year. Whereas Blindspot is focused on some version of quality and/or popularity, WDYMYHS (for short) has some kind of theme.

This year, I was rather coming up short for what that should be. Via some series of connections or other, I ended up at iCheckMovies, which, for those who don’t know it, was sort of like Letterboxd before Letterboxd came along and did a similar thing but better. iCM is still going, for whatever that’s worth, and I still look at it from time to time to see how I’m progressing on various lists. That’s where the inspiration for this year’s grab bag-type WDYMYHS selection came from: a few of my favourite IMDb genre lists that I haven’t yet completed. When combined, the number of films I haven’t seen on the lists for Sci-fi, Action, Adventure, Mystery, and Thriller (which is the order I looked at them in) comes out at exactly… eleven. But one of those is a two-part film that everyone else lists as two films, which brings us to exactly the number I need for WDYMYHS.

I’m happy to admit it’s not my best theme ever, but it’ll do.

So, in alphabetical order, this year’s films are…

The Cremator

The Cremator

Dersu Uzala

 Dersu Uzala
Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 1

Gangs of Wasseypur
Part 1

Gangs of Wasseypur
Part 2

 Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 2
The Great Escape

The Great Escape

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
The Handmaiden

The Handmaiden

Infernal Affairs

 Infernal Affairs
PK

PK

A Wednesday!

 A Wednesday!
White Heat

White Heat

Woman in the Dunes

 Woman in the Dunes

A couple of motes of trivia to end on. Both The Great Escape and The Handmaiden were possible films for WDYMYHS 2024, also thanks to IMDb user-voted lists (I was aiming to finish the Top 250, which meant I had 19 films for the 12 slots. I didn’t finish the Top 250, but I did watch 12 films — not including those two, obviously).

There’s also a WDYMYHS repeat in this year’s Blindspot selection: The Royal Tenenbaums was supposed to be watched in 2019, but I fell short that year. There were quite a few films I failed to watch from that set (I listed them in 2020’s Blindspot post), but this is the only one still outstanding. Hopefully, I won’t say the same in 2027…

Blindspot 2026

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This is my 14th year doing a version of Blindspot, so perhaps my customary introduction to the concept is totally unnecessary… but just in case there are still people who haven’t heard of it, this is a challenge in which you pick twelve films you’ve never seen but feel you should have (your blindspots) and watch one per month throughout the year.

In chronological order, this year’s films are…

Different from the Others

1910s
Anders als die Andern

1920s
The Phantom Carriage

 The Phantom Carriage
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1930s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1940s
Suspicion

 Suspicion
Hiroshima Mon Amour

1950s
Hiroshima Mon Amour

1960s
Belle de Jour

 Belle de Jour
Sorcerer

1970s
Sorcerer

1980s
Poltergeist

 Poltergeist
The Prince of Egypt

1990s
The Prince of Egypt

2000s
The Royal Tenenbaums

 The Royal Tenenbaums
The Great Gatsby

2010s
The Great Gatsby

2020s
Poor Things

 Poor Things

For many of the previous 13 years, my Blindspot selection process has been tortuously complicated. I don’t think I’ve ever simply picked twelve films I feel like watching (which is how I’ve seen other people make their selection — perfectly reasonably). Instead, I usually compile various “great films” lists, rank and weight them in various imaginative ways, and thus concoct some kind of ranking-of-rankings to generate 12 new picks. I long ago ruled out relying on the same methodology every year, because that way it’s never surprising and never refreshed — I’d just be working down a very long list, year by year.

Last year, I made things a lot simpler: I looked on Letterboxd for the most popular film I’d not seen from each decade since the origin of feature films, and there was my list. I enjoyed that ‘history of cinema’ approach so much, I decided to repeat it this year. But, as I said, I don’t like to just take the next film on any given list, so I mixed it up slightly. By default, the decade search on Letterboxd displays 18 films (three rows of six). So, having filtered it to the ones I’d not seen, I randomised the selection by rolling a d20 (because rolling dice is fun).

If you’re curious, the rolls were as follows…

Decade Roll
1910s 11
1920s 3
1930s 12
1940s 6
1950s 20
1960s 8
1970s 14
1980s 5
1990s 14
2000s 4
2010s 4
2020s 5

“But, hold on a minute,” you might say, “a d20 has 20 sides, and your selection lists only had 18 films — what happened on a 19 or 20?” A perfectly reasonable and well-observed question. And, as you can see, a 20 was indeed rolled. Of course, I’d thought of a solution in advance, because it was likely the situation would arise (there being a 1-in-10 chance of rolling 19 or 20 on a d20, and there being 12 rolls). The solution was… more dice rolls (because rolling dice is fun).

Or, rather, one more roll, as it only happened once. As a 19 or 20 is a high success, I limited it to the top row (i.e. the six most popular films) and rolled a d6*… and on that, I got a 1 — meaning the 1950s is the only decade for which I’m watching the most popular unseen film, i.e. the one I would’ve watched if I had just picked the next film on the list. Which is fine — the point of randomising the choice wasn’t to stop it ever being the next film on the list, just prevent it being definitively and only that.

* (I appreciate that this system would make no sense in a game (why is 1–6 the optimal result but 19 or 20 results in another 1–6?!), but this isn’t a game, it’s a random number generator, so it’s fine.)

The 20th 100 Films in a Year Challenge

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For the 20th year in a row, I’m going to attempt to watch 100 films in a year.

Except, as regular readers will know, it’s a bit more complicated than that nowadays. Just watching any old 100 films each year became a matter of course — the “challenge” aspect died off entirely when I was regularly reaching 200+ films for a few years. So, a few years ago, I reimagined it into what is, effectively, a series of smaller, more specific film-watching challenges, which altogether add up to 100 films in a year.

(Alongside this, I also aim to watch ten new films a month, for a total of 120 a year. My lifestyle and habits have changed in the past few years, so that’s also more of a challenge than it once would have been. Indeed, I failed to do it last year. And I’m about 90% sure I’m going to immediately fail it for 2026 by not getting there in January. At least it’ll take any pressure off for the rest of the year.)

This is the fifth iteration of my new-style Challenge, and each year so far I’ve made some changes — removed and added categories; modified the qualification rules within a category; etc. That was part of my conception of this new version: that it wouldn’t stand still; it wouldn’t become something I could learn ‘how’ to do and repeat ad infinitum. However, I’ve settled on a category lineup that I’m so happy with I don’t want to change it… so I’m not going to. That said, there are certain categories (three of the nine, to be precise) that change their theme or makeup every year anyway, meaning an element of changeability does persist.

So, let’s see what that the 100 Films in a Year Challenge involves for its 20th edition…

First, the one rule that applies across all categories: a film can only count once. That might sound obvious, but the categories are not mutually exclusive: I could rewatch a film from a series I’m halfway through that’s in this year’s genre, and thus it could qualify in three categories — but it can only be counted in one of them.

New Films

x12. Any film with a general release date (i.e. not festival screenings, etc) in the UK (i.e. not in the US, nor any other country) between 1st January 2025 and 31st December 2025. Maximum one per month (but rolls over if I fail to watch one).

Rewatches

x12. Any film I’ve seen before (unless it’s already been counted in 2026’s Challenge). Maximum one per month (with rollovers, as above).

Blindspot

x12. Twelve films, specifically chosen and named in advance, that I should have already seen. Meant to be watched one per month, but I typically fail at that and have to play catch up. This year’s twelve will be revealed in a dedicated post tomorrow.

What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?

x12. Similar to Blindspot, these are twelve specifically chosen films meant to be watched one per month, but here my selections are based around a theme. This year’s theme, and the twelve films selected, will be revealed in a dedicated post tomorrow.

Failures

x12. Every month, I list my “failures”: brand-new releases, additions to streamers, and disc purchases that I failed to watch in the previous month. Sometimes I catch up on some of them the next month; often I don’t. Making them a Challenge category helps with this. A maximum of one per month counts. If I miss one, I catch up on that specific month later.

50 Unseen

x10. Any unwatched film from one of my year-end ’50 Unseen’ lists. It’s likely to be dominated by films from 2025’s list as I catch up on what I missed last year, but anything from the previous 19 years is eligible. (If you’re interested, there’s a complete list of candidates here.)

Genre

x10. Any films from within a specified genre — or, arguably, a sub-genre: I’m not focusing on anything broad like “Action” or “Comedy” here, but something relatively specific. Previous choices have included film noir, gialli, poliziotteschi, and martial arts movies. This year, it’s classic 3D — by which I mean, any film originally released in 3D before the current Avatar-initiated era. (Okay, it’s not really a “genre”, but then neither is film noir if you want to get picky about it.)

Series Progression

x10. Any instalment of a film series I’m already watching. If I start a new series, the first film can’t count but any further films can. (If you’re curious, there’s a list of film series I’m in the middle of here. At time of writing, there’s 36.)

Wildcards

x10. Any film that can’t have qualified in another category at any point. For example, I couldn’t watch two brand-new releases in January and count the second one here, or watch ten classic 3D films and then count an eleventh here.

As the year goes on, you can follow my progress on the Challenge Tracker page, and also via my monthly reviews; or there’s always my Letterboxd for the guaranteed most up-to-date status of my film logging.

The Best of 2025

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The whole point of these year-in-review posts is to reflect on the year just gone, of course, but this time round it’s made me think about more than just what films I watched, what films I missed, the various trends they contributed to or failed at, and which of them were better than which others. I’m not about to get too philosophical, but…

While it hasn’t been a great year for my blog (what with the total and entire lack of any new reviews whatsoever), my 100 Films in a Year Challenge has been important on a personal level to a degree it hasn’t been since perhaps even 2007, the year I first attempted the challenge. Back then, the whole point was to get me to watch more films. From about 2012 onwards, I got into such a groove that it was less “can I watch 100 films?” and more “how quickly can I watch 100 films? And how many more after that?” Recently, though, my attention has wandered to other forms of entertainment (even before I felt compelled to include comparative graphs in the statistics post). That’s no bad thing — for years I’ve mentioned how my focus on film viewing arguably detracts from other things I want to do — but, as I’ve finally cracked that (to an extent), the Challenge has resumed its old role of being a force to drag me back to movies. Without the “need” it provides to keep my progress ticking over and complete the goal, I’m certain I would’ve watched even fewer films than I did this past year.

That said, it hasn’t been a great movie year in another respect: quality. Indeed, as the statistics have already revealed, it was my second-lowest scoring year ever, a fact that bears out how I’ve felt about it all along. It’s not got so bad that I wanted to bring back my ‘worst of’ list (which I ditched in 2022 because we don’t need to celebrate negativity), but, truth be told, there aren’t many “all-time favourite”-level films in the list below. Nor was it a hotly-contested battle for the top spot (unlike some years, when half the list could have taken #1 if I’d been in a different mood). That doesn’t mean these are bad films by any means — I didn’t consider ditching the list entirely! — so it’s time for me to stop being such a downer on them and switch into praiseful mode.



The Twelve Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2025

It’s ten years this year since I made a significant permanent change to my ‘best of’ list, but I still feel the need to clarify this every year. Maybe that’s unnecessary, but hey, it never hurts to be clear. So, what used to be a “top 10” is nowadays a “top 10%” — I watched 116 movies for the first time in 2025, which comes out as 12 films in this year’s top ‘ten’.

And another point I’ll continue to clarify year after year is that all 116 of those movies are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. Nonetheless, I have sometimes included a ranking for the current year; but as I only watched 17 films that had their UK release in 2025 and (no spoilers) very few of them have made the top ten, I haven’t bothered to note their ‘2025 rank’ this time.

Now, without any further caveats…

12

Anna Karenina


Joe Wright’s Tolstoy adaptation boasts phenomenal stylised production design and cinematography; enough that the characters and story are almost incidental — whatever their quality, the visuals would be worth it. I have no idea whether it’s a faithful or accurate adaptation, but as an overall work of art, it’s enchanting.

11

The Power of the Dog


I sort of avoided this for a while, because I’ve not always got on with Jane Campion’s work and thought it might be a bit too abstruse for my taste. Indeed, it’s not always clear why you’re watching what you’re watching as it goes along, but it all clicks into place by the end; which, further, makes me think it might be even better on a rewatch.

10

Juggernaut


Considered dispassionately, Juggernaut deploys most of the familiar beats and clichés of any bomb-disposal-based thriller. But I overlooked all that when actually watching it thanks to the touch of director Richard Lester, who brings a kind of absurd mundanity to the “keep calm and carry on” attitude of the passengers even as bombs are going off beneath them. The silliness and tension work in harmony to make the latter hit home, clichés or no; and the star-studded cast give weight to even small scenes and moments, such that the manhunt on dry land feels as vital as the action at sea.

9

Predator: Killer of Killers


This first of two Predator movies released in 2025 (I haven’t yet seen the second), this was a direct-to-streaming animated anthology that could have been little more than a promo for the later film (a big-budget theatrical release). Perhaps that’s how it was conceived (I don’t know), but what we got was nothing so vacuous. As it barrels from one thrillingly-realised action sequence to another, you’d think it would become monotonous, yet it’s all so well done that instead it’s a non-stop adrenaline rush. It seems like Dan Trachtenberg (who was also responsible for Prey) just gets what a Predator movie should be.

8

The Untouchables


Quite a few films in this year’s list are great showcases for cinematic flair, and while some of them are very overt in that, others might not scream it in quite the same way, but it’s unmissable when you watch the whole thing. The Untouchables is, naturally, an example of the latter. The Battleship Potemkin-referencing stairway shootout is the most famous example (and, even now, it lives up to expectations as one of cinema’s greatest gunfights), but there are many more superb sequences scattered across the film, and Ennio Morricone’s score is an all-time selection of bangers to boot. No one should come to this film for a history lesson, but it is pure cinema.

7

The City of Lost Children


Jeunet & Caro’s steampunk fairytale boasts all the darkness and grotesquery you would expect of the latter’s traditional form, alongside production design so exquisite and cinematography so striking that they render it a contender for the best-looking film ever made. Three decades on, you can see where its influence has bled into various other films, but its off-kilter otherworldliness means it nonetheless feels totally unique.

6

Lifeforce


Lifeforce is probably best known for featuring Mathilda May naked and, yeah, there’s certainly plenty of that and, yeah, if you’re so inclined it’s certainly a highlight. It’s sort of gratuitous, but sort of justified because the film is then about how she’s so sexy it kills people and might end the world. That aside, it’s kind of like an updated Quatermass: a British-set sci-fi/horror about gruesome terrors arriving from outer space and potentially threatening us all. The way it escalates as it goes on is absolutely barmy and kinda inspired. They should make more films like this. Frankly, this is exactly the sort of stuff stereotypical 13-year-old boys should want to watch, not more Marvel slop.

5

I Saw the TV Glow


This does for the ’90s what Donnie Darko did for the ’80s, albeit even more obliquely. It’s a suburban sci-fi / fantasy / horror for anyone who grew up watching shows like Twin Peaks or Buffy the Vampire Slayer — so, me! As that, the vibes are immaculate and the cinematography is gorgeous, of the kind that really shines when augmented with HDR; but it’s certainly not style over substance, choosing to foreground some deeper themes (some would say at the expense of a story, but I thought they were just intertwined).

4

Wake Up Dead Man


The third in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out Benoit Blanc series furthers the impression that the writer-director is a natural heir to Agatha Christie in terms of crafting compelling murder mysteries that also have something to say about people and/or society. The tone here swings darker than the caricatured satire of Glass Onion, but the eye for comedy is not totally lost even alongside weightier religious themes and some well-deserved poking of the American right. Plus, while it’s not as overtly stylised as several other films on this list, it looks gorgeous — like its predecessor, Knives Out, it manages to make digital photography look convincingly film-like and thus outclasses almost everyone else using the medium today.

3

Rebel Without a Cause


When choosing what to include in this list, there’s always a tension between “films I thought were examples of great cinema” and “films I personally enjoyed, for potentially esoteric reasons”. The latter usually wins out on balance — and I think some of the films we’ve already passed on this list speak to that, as will the films still to come — but the former is not unimportant. Rebel Without a Cause is definitely a case of the former. Not because I didn’t enjoy it (I’m happy to exclude films that are widely acclaimed but I didn’t like), but it didn’t give me that zing you get from a movie you love whatever its flaws. That said, it still surprised me (it wasn’t wholly what I thought it was going to be), and… well, I don’t want to turn this into a whole review, so I’ll sum up thus: all round, I think it’s an example of great cinema.

2

Tenebrae


If I based this ranking solely on style, Dario Argento’s 1982 giallo would win hands down (though a couple of films from earlier in the list would give it a run for its money, to be fair). The camera moves, the colours, the editing, the banging soundtrack… the vibes are perfection. I’m not convinced the plot completely hangs together (which is not to say it’s not entertaining, I’m just not sure it fully adds up), but when everything else is firing on all cylinders like this, I can let that slide.

1

The Wild Robot


The genre of “animated movies about an emotive robot in an (initially) human-free world” may be small — as far as I’m aware, it’s just this and WALL•E (and, depending how you define “human-free”, Robot Dreams) — but I think this one is my favourite. In keeping with so many entries on this year’s list, it’s beautifully visualised; but it also features characters and a story that tug your heartstrings in multiple different ways, and it even manages to surprise occasionally in where it chooses to go and when. Incidentally, this is the first animated film to top my ‘best of’ list in 19 years of producing them, so that’s cool too.

My process for putting together this best-of is to create a long-list throughout the year of films that might end up in contention. I do occasionally look over it and remove things, so I can’t say how many were long-listed overall, but by December 31st it was at 54. Some of these are eliminated quickly — I take a broad view of “might end up in contention”, because an opinion can shift after a film sits with you a while, so I’ll long-list a title I’m only somewhat enamoured with if I feel I might settle into liking it more. Sometimes I do; often, I don’t. Others end up almost getting in to my final ranking, but don’t quite make it — so, as usual, I’d just like to highlight a few of them.

These are not #13–18 on my list (that would be cheating — if I wanted to do a longer list, I could), just a few of the films that came close and I had something to say about (for context, there were at least four or five more in a similar situation that I’m not bothering to touch on).

In no particular order…

  • A Real Pain almost made it onto the list thanks to just one scene that made the whole film click for me (which I quoted/summarised on Letterboxd), but that perspective wasn’t quite enough to squeeze it into a top 12 (top 15 or 20, maybe).
  • The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is not one of Hitchcock’s very best works, but you can see the early signs of where he’s going to go. It feels like the product of a talented semi-amateur rather than the fully-fledged auteur he’d become.
  • Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was too bloated and reminiscent of previous instalments (story-wise, the climax was just a do-over of the film-before-last) to reach the highs of the franchise’s very best entries, but I still enjoyed it overall, and the action was as impressive as ever (the aforementioned climax is also a jaw-dropping stunt showcase).
  • In 2023, one of my Challenge categories centred on film noir, and it ended with them dominating my best-of list. The same has not happened with poliziotteschi this year. (In fairness, it didn’t happen with gialli in 2023 or noir in 2022, and only one martial arts film made it last year.) My favourites — which were some of the last films to be pushed out of the final version of this year’s list — were The Italian Connection, Slap the Monster on Page One, and Street Law.

Now, let’s recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some of them have already been mentioned in this post, some haven’t, but either way, in chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Milano Calibro 9, Macbeth, Lifeforce, The King of Kings, I Saw the TV Glow, The Untouchables, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, The Wild Robot, Rebel Without a Cause, Tenebrae, Le Samouraï, and Wake Up Dead Man.

Finally, I’ve always ended this section by listing every film that earned a 5-star rating during the year. It seems right to acknowledge the films that scored top marks, and there’s normally far too many to include in my main list (even if it weren’t for the fact 4-star films usually sneak in too). But, as you’ll already know if you’ve read the statistics, this year there were only four films I scored so highly. It’s no real surprise that, with such a select list, for once all of them made it into the top 10%… but I’ve not actually said which they were anywhere yet, so they bear listing nonetheless: Rebel Without a Cause, Tenebrae, Wake Up Dead Man, and The Wild Robot.

For the last few years, I’ve done very poorly at keeping up with new releases… and 2025 was no exception: as noted earlier, I watched just 17 films that had their UK release during the year. For comparison, it was 57 in 2020; and even if you allow for that being a year when more than usual had home premieres, it was 50 in 2018.

That means this year’s “50 Unseen” list — my annual pick of 50 films designated as being from 2025 that I haven’t yet seen — features plenty of famous flicks, though I’ve also popped in a few smaller-but-acclaimed titles, as well as some that might become more prominent as awards season drags on. I will inevitably have forgotten or misjudged something noteworthy, but — as always — this list has been narrowed down from a much, much longer one based on a variety of factors, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, and aims to represent a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures (though I still couldn’t bring myself to include the new War of the Worlds).

28 Years Later
Drop
Final Destination Bloodlines
Jurassic World Rebirth
The Naked Gun
TRON: Ares
Ballerina
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Good Boy
Mickey 17
Sinners
Wolf Man
28 Years Later
Avatar: Fire and Ash
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Ballerina
Black Bag
Blue Moon
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Bugonia
Captain America: Brave New World
Caught Stealing
Drop
Eddington
The Electric State
Elio
Eternity
F1
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Final Destination Bloodlines
Good Boy
Hamnet
How to Train Your Dragon
It Was Just an Accident
Jurassic World Rebirth
Karate Kid: Legends
The Life of Chuck
Lilo & Stitch
The Long Walk
Marty Supreme
Materialists
Mickey 17
A Minecraft Movie
The Naked Gun
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t
One Battle After Another
The Phoenician Scheme
Predator: Badlands
The Roses
The Running Man
The Salt Path
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Snow White
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
Thunderbolts*
Train Dreams
TRON: Ares
Weapons
Wicked: For Good
Wolf Man
Zootropolis 2

And with that, another year is over. It’s been a bit of an odd one in some ways, and I feel less confident than ever in predicting what the next year will bring blog-wise… except that I do plan to do it all over again, for the 20th time.

20 years! You know, I was only 20 myself when I started all this. Makes you think… but I’ll save what it makes me think for some future musing.