Category Archives: Failures

August’s Failures

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Welcome to my monthly “Failures” column, where I look back at some of the films I could, would, maybe even should have watched last month… but failed to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 biggest film on the big screen this month… was one I actually went to see, in my first cinema visit of the year. Next biggest, I guess, will end up being Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Remember the MCU? Yep, it’s still going. Less successful for Disney: the live-action remake of Moana. Oh dear what a shame. Also still going: Minions, in Minions & Monsters, plus the Evil Dead in Evil Dead Burn. Apparently quite good were The Invite and the punctuationally-baffling Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie, both of which I’ll definitely add to watchlists or something.

On streaming, last month’s theatrical release Masters of the Universe made it to Amazon Prime Video already, which I guess shows how well that did. Other theatrical releases from the tail end of last year / earlier this year made their streaming debuts too, with Marty Supreme and The Housemaid also on Prime, while Sky Cinema / NOW was positively flooded with them: in alphabetical order, Anaconda, Anemone (the latest film to tempt Daniel Day-Lewis out of retirement, this time because it was made by his son), Bugonia, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Lurker, Mortal Kombat II, Normal, Redux Redux, and Wicked: For Good. Over on Disney+ (which I’m not subscribed to so I don’t know why I mention it) were The Devil Wears Prada 2, which I guess counts as a legacy sequel at this point, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which I’d like to see but not enough to subscribe to a whole streamer for.

Meanwhile, Netflix had… um… back catalogue stuff? Of particular note, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, which has moved a round a few different streamers now and I’ve still not seen, so maybe this time; one of the handful of Tony Scott films I’ve never seen, The Fan; that recent-ish animated Transformers movie that I think I heard was meant to be quite good or something, Transformers One; and, as ever, a bunch of stuff I own on disc and need to get round to (re)watching, like Monsters vs Aliens, the Paul W.S. Anderson The Three Musketeers (don’t judge me, I love the musketeers; also, it’s in my beloved 3D), and Training Day (what month doesn’t see Training Day appearing on a different streamer, it feels like). Widening the net, we find more examples on Prime — Blade Runner (which I’ve not seen since its 4K disc came out), The Prestige (same), and Unforgiven (same, but even longer) — and iPlayer — Elvis, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, North by Northwest, Vertigo, and all the Spider-Mans. Messing up my neat progression of formats, iPlayer is also the latest home for romcom Anyone But You, plus the TV premiere of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (Letterboxd user’s 108th greatest film of all time, currently), and repeat appearances for Paul Thomas Anderson’s’ Licorice Pizza and Past Lives (430th on that Letterboxd list).

Okay, back to discs for all the new stuff I threw my money away on… er, I mean, added to my most venerated collection. Yeah, that. This month’s list of titles isn’t excessive, but the lists of films kind of things, thanks to finally picking up All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, Volume Two in Severin’s most recent sale — that’s 24 feature films (plus 21 shorts), to go with the 22 features (and 14 shorts) from Volume One that I still haven’t watched. Oh dear. But at least my collection’s complete! From folk horror to folk tales, this month Masters of Cinema released one box set of five German examples of the latter, titled Into the Forest: Folktales at DEFA, including a staple of ’60s and ’70s British children’s TV, The Singing Ringing Tree; and announced a second set (Beneath the Trees: Folktales at DEFA 2) for release in October.

Elsewise, it was the usual case of 4K release from boutique labels, with a pair each from Arrow — an upgrade for William Friedkin’s neo-noir To Live and Die in L.A. and my first ever purchase of Soylent Green (of course, I already know the twist. Does anyone not?) — and Hammer — the latest of their big single-film box sets, X the Unknown, plus AIP’s 1971 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Finally, a trio for my extensive Radiance collection, covering Shohei Imamura’s “landmark satire of postwar affluence” about “a former buddhist monk turned erotic filmmaker” (sounds good, right?) The Pornographers in UHD, and in regular ol’ 1080p, more Imamura with the director’s final film, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, a “boldly sensuous and taboo-breaking love story”, plus Solo — not a Star Wars story, but Jean-Pierre Mocky writing, directing, and starring in a “profoundly satirical crime drama” that “captures the visceral feeling of disillusionment of a post-1968 French society brimming with rage at the sinister powers that be.” Fun times.

I have a Letterboxd list for said Radiance collection, which shows I own 150 features and shorts released by them… of which I’ve watched four. Well, it literally could be worse.

June’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.

Blockbuster season (if that even still exists) is in full swing now, with the likes of Masters of the Universe, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, Toy Story 5 (apparently it’s good?!), and Supergirl filling up the multiplexes this month (or, in the case of the latter, not). None have been strong enough to tempt me out, which shouldn’t surprise any regular readers. The Odyssey ought to get me over the line (we’ll see).

As usual, this meant streaming originals were in shorter supply. Netflix managed to wheel out a few star names across “saucy rom-com” Office Romance and Julian “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante, although as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus pegs the latter as “a bloated, wildly overplayed literary fever dream whose attempts to merge past and present collapse into accidental farce”, I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to it in my queue. Prime Video’s dark comedy-thriller Over Your Dead Body seems like a better bet, even if it wasn’t spectacularly reviewed either.

But why stick to Originals when there’s better-reviewed streaming premieres fresh from the big screen? Also on Prime, comedy murder mystery The Sheep Detectives boasts 95% on Rotten Tomatoes (should anyone still care about that as a metric), there was under-seen spin-off Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is… well, it’s a good title, anyway. I liked the first two enough that I aim to watch it at some point. The same could be said about Sisu: Road to Revenge on NOW, although their other premieres this month were nothing to shout about, unusually. Meanwhile, Disney+ offered up the biggest box office successes in Pixar’s Hoppers and threequel Avatar: Fire and Ash. At the other end of the spectrum were Netflix, where I’ve not noted down anything so new, just stuff that’s already been well-played on other streamers (even though I’ve not seen them yet, obviously), like Aftersun, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Creed III, and Scoob! (which is simultaneously on Prime Video anyway). Most interesting to me was The Other Boleyn Girl, purely because it’s a leftover from 2008’s 50 Unseen that doesn’t seem to be available to stream all that often.

Further into the back catalogue, iPlayer has boasted a few titles recently that used to be exclusive to one streamer or another — things like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Queer, the Road House remake, and Sound of Metal. It can flow the other way too, with Bodies Bodies Bodies (which has been on and off iPlayer for a while) cropping up on Prime Video this month. As usual, drawing a lot of my attention were reminders for things I’ve already paid for on disc but not watched, like The Dreamers, Event Horizon, First Man, How the West Was Won, The Town, and The Walk (though that last one I own in 3D, at least, so the streaming option would never satisfy me as much).

Regardless, new purchases continue, including one I’ve already mentioned on streaming: Avatar: Fire and Ash; although, like The Walk, I own it on 3D. I could double-bill it with the previous film, The Way of Water, which I’ve still not seen either, although together they’re the length of a miniseries. Also in 3D this month, 88 Films’ long-awaited release of Jackie Chan’s Magnificent Bodyguards, from a brand-new restoration by the 3-D Film Archive. There was a lot of Chan this month, in fact, thanks also to Arrow’s Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits! set, containing six films from the early days of his Hollywood career in UHD (along with a total of eight additional alternate cuts! Thorough, but am I ever likely to watch all of those? No.)

As is regularly the case now, the vast majority of my purchases were 4K titles from boutique labels, including a bulk order from Australian label Imprint — headlined by a regular Blu-ray box set, After Dark: Neo-Noir Cinema, Collection Four, although even that includes one film (Unlawful Entry) in UHD. Along with it was more ’90s neo-noir in the form of Dark Blue, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (looks like horror to me, but they label it noir), and State of Grace; plus William Friedkin’s erotic thriller Jade and Hammer Horror Vampire Circus. Hammer themselves, meanwhile, stuck to the more niche side of their output with Brit-noir 36 Hours. Even more niche was The House of Hammer: Volume 1 — effectively a kind of “Blu-ray magazine”, containing two whole discs of special features and a “booklet” the length of a short book, but no feature film content. Like a sucker, I bought it anyway, thus committing myself to future releases (not literally “committed”, but I’m a completist). Rounding things out, Arrow’s latest John Woo title, Bullet in the Head; catching up with StudioCanal’s recent release of Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone; and even one title from a major studio, the Wachowskis’ blockbuster-turned-cult-classic adaptation of Speed Racer. I’ve been meaning to revisit that for years, so seeing its vibrant colours in HDR should be the push I need, right?

Right?

May’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.

Star Wars returned to the big screen for the first time in seven years this month, with TV spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s the first theatrically-released Star War I’ve not seen since the animated Clone Wars movie 18 years ago, and the first live-action Star War I won’t bother to see on the big screen… ever. (I didn’t exist when the original trilogy came out, but I saw them all during their 1997 re-releases.) I’m not even sure I’ll bother with it when it comes to streaming, because I’ve never seen the series it launches off from. Hey, Disney chose to drag the franchise towards being a niche fans-only affair, not me.

And it looks like general audiences may be feeling the same as me, because two low-budget horror films from Gen Z filmmakers — Backrooms and Obsession — knocked Mando back to the third place at the box office on just its second weekend. Ouch. And one of those was on its third week, too. Very ouch. Other theatrical bows that I might one day watch but wasn’t inspired to leave home for included belated sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2; video game sequel Mortal Kombat II; a new Steven Soderbergh, The Christophers; a new Ben Wheatley, starring Bob Odenkirk, Normal; ovine murder mystery The Sheep Detectives; John Carney making his film again (I suspect) in Power Ballad; crime thriller Tuner; and other stuff I’m even less likely to actually get round to ever.

Similarly, most of the streamers’ brand-new originals this month were things I’m never likely to watch, like alternate-world gender comedy Ladies First and kids’ body-swap animation Swapped on Netflix, or Mel Gibson-starrer Hunting Season on Amazon Prime Video. The latter had the most likely contender of the month in snappily-titled TV spin-off Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War, but the fact I never watched the show beyond season one (which I enjoyed, I just never kept up) gives me pause. Netflix’s best bet for my eyeballs was Martin Short documentary Marty, Life Is Short.

As is often the case, there were stronger options in the field of theatrical releases making their subscription streaming debut, like Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk on Prime Video, although Sky Cinema / NOW dominates as usual, including another Stephen King adaptation — Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man — plus Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, legacy sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Frankenstein variant The Bride!, 50% Coen Honey Don’t! (yes, both with exclamation marks), and a few other bits and pieces that I added to my watchlist but don’t really merit a mention.

Multitudinous back catalogue titles reminded me of their existence by shifting from one streamer to another or popping back after some time away, like “granny on a revenge mission” comedy Thelma (moving from NOW to Netflix) or the most recent (though already ten years old) iteration of Ben-Hur (only noteworthy to me for being one of the few 2016 ‘50 Unseen’s I’ve still not seen). Some films even finally made their way to broadcast TV (remember that?), with the likes of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Arthur the King, and The Iron Claw popping up on iPlayer. Plentiful reminders of stuff I bought on disc but haven’t watched, too, like 1932 Best Picture winner Grand Hotel or Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai; and that’s without starting on the shame of stuff I’ve re-bought on 4K but not watched, like Collateral (that one seems to come up fairly often), A History of Violence, The Nice Guys, and The Searchers (for just a semi-random selection — yeah, there were even more).

There were a couple of new purchases in that vein: the impossible-seeming full restoration of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie for its 30th anniversary (I wanted to watch it on the anniversary itself, but was otherwise occupied) and Masters of Cinema’s new edition of Buster Keaton’s The General. Every other purchase this month was also from a boutique label: more from Masters of Cinema with Maigret adaptation Cécile is Dead and East German anti-socialist political drama Trace of Stones; French secret agent actioner Le professionnel from Radiance (yes, really), alongside New Wave yakuza thriller Aesthetics of a Bullet; Hammer’s latest title from their non-horror backlist, Brit-noir Mantrap, as well as a disc release for feature-length TV doc Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters; 88 Films’ latest contribution to getting Jackie Chan’s work released in 4K, The Protector; and, finally, the BFI’s latest Akira Kurosawa title, Red Beard, which finally escapes DVD to… regular Blu-ray. Can’t have everything in 4K, I guess.

April’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.

I often think I should make more of an effort to get to the cinema, but then I look at what’s out and think, “to see what?” Sure, I’ll inevitably watch things like video game sequel The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Jacko biopic Michael when they come to a streamer I’m subscribed to (or add them to my watchlist, at least), but I don’t feel compelled to go out of my way to see them. I should probably make an effort to support smaller titles, like Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, but they don’t screen at my local, and once you add in the cost of travel and time to go further afield, the value proposition is even lower. It’s like this most months nowadays. Is it just me, or is it the state of modern cinema? I dunno.

Other big screen releases destined to end up on my watchlist someday included Zendaya / Robert Pattinson drama The Drama, Lee Cronin horror Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Oliver Assayas’s political thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin, and David Lowery’s pop-music-based psychological thriller Mother Mary.

The original offerings from streamers weren’t much more edifying. World Cup adjacent comedy Balls Up? Sounds balls. Greenland sequel Greenland: Migration? I never bothered with the first one, never mind a followup. Shark movie Thrash is the kind of genre fare I probably would’ve bunged on once upon a time, but I doubt I’ll make time for it nowadays. Action-thriller Apex at least boasts Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton, and Eric Bana among its cast, proving that recognisable names are still a factor in drawing a film to your attention. Literally all I know about Apple TV+’s Outcome is it stars Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz and was written and directed by actor Jonah Hill, but that was enough for me to notice it and bung it on this list. Mind you, the film I’m mostly likely to actually watch is Eat Pray Bark, because dogs.

There’s more interesting fare thanks to theatrical releases making their streaming debuts, like the revival of the Final Destination franchise, Final Destination: Bloodlines; or Zach Cregger’s Oscar-winning horror Weapons; or Richard Linklater’s Oscar-nominated Blue Moon; or Dwayne Johnson’s attempt at Oscar bait, The Smashing Machine; or Ari Aster’s Eddington; or Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing; or Crime 101, which I swear was only just in cinemas. (Those are spread around between NOW and Amazon Prime Video, if you’re interested. Don’t think there was any Netflix in there. There’s even less to say about the other streamers… so I won’t.)

A plethora of back catalogue stuff vies for a mention, as usual. Netflix seemed to mop up a bunch of Warner Bros films, possibly in anticipation of the acquisition that didn’t happen, including DC superhero flicks like Blue Beetle, The Flash, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, none of which are new and all of which have been on my watchlist since whatever streamer they used to be on; possibly across several. I can’t quite decide if I’ve finally ‘grown out’ of superhero movies or if the ones they’re churning out now are just uninteresting. But I didn’t dislike James Gunn’s Superman and enjoyed the first season of Daredevil: Born Again (I still need to start the second), so maybe it is them not me.

What else? John Woo’s remake of his own film, The Killer, jumped from NOW to Netflix. Meg 2: The Trench also moved there from… er, wherever it used to be… reminding me that I quite enjoyed the first one and did mean to watch the second. The Magic Mike trilogy also collated itself there (I feel like those three films are constantly popping on and off various services, but are rarely to be found in one place all at once). Over on Prime Video, the 2021 Mortal Kombat popped up ahead of the forthcoming sequel, while other recent-ish things I’ve been meaning to catch up with included The Bikeriders, Freaky, and King Richard; plus, looking back some way (as in “six decades”), the third Harry Palmer film, Billion Dollar Brain.

Even worse, the stuff goading me that I bought it and haven’t watched it still: Alita: Battle Angel, the new(er) Candyman, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire all on Prime. Even worse…er: on iPlayer, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. You know you’ve left stuff a long time when it’s been on free-to-air TV. And that’s just the recent-ish films — how’s about American Gangster, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and La La Land on Netflix (all titles I’ve owned on at least two formats, including 4K, but not watched the latter yet); on iPlayer, Don’t Look Now, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and The Wicker Man; on Amazon, But I’m a Cheerleader, Heat, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Thelma & Louise, Time Bandits, all the Spider-Man films, and a tonne of Gamera films. I didn’t bother to note exactly how many — the important point is, I’ve got Arrow’s complete series set from 2020 that I’ve not started.

No box sets quite that big in April’s selection of new purchases — just a trilogy of Japanese Godfather films from Radiance and the Wandering Ginza Butterfly duo from Arrow. Talking of John Woo’s The Killer (as I was two paragraphs back), the original made it to 4K this month courtesy of Arrow. (I was tempted to put them both in this post’s header image, but… I didn’t.) Other classics (how “classic” these “classics” are, I’ll leave up to you) making their way to 4K disc included Tsui Hark’s One Armed Swordsman remake The Blade from Criterion, neo-noir Cutter’s Way from Radiance; and a pair of Hammer titles from StudioCanal, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and Demons of the Mind. Maybe I should stop buying everything that gets put out from Hammer’s back catalogue, but, well, I’ve started now. It would be less bad if I did something truly radical and actually watched more of them…

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.

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.

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.

December’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.

I guess the big theatrical release of the month was the third entry in James Cameron’s sci-fi opus, Avatar: Fire and Ash, though I don’t feel like I heard much hype for it. That said, I’m kinda out of the loop on that nowadays, so who knows? The second one was unexpectedly huge at the box office, so I wouldn’t bet against this one doing big numbers also. I’ve still not seen the second one, Avatar: The Way of Water, which I think also counts as a December failure because the release of a followup should have been the perfect motivation to finally bung the disc in (yes, I own it. Of course I do).

The film that almost actually tempted me out of the house and into the multiplex this month was the long (long) awaited release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. It’s only taken us 22 years to get here! My local only had one screening and the time didn’t work for me, so that ended up being a no-go. Really hoping it gets a disc release. I also would have liked to have seen the BFI’s release of Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases, a bundle of examples from their project to restore the Stoll Picture / Eille Norwood series of silent-era Sherlock Holmes films. I couldn’t find a screening reasonably near me though. Another one I’ve hoped would come to disc for a long time (since before they announced the restoration project, but with renewed hope since they did).

Most blockbusters run in fear of a new Avatar, but the remake (or whatever — I saw Jack Black promoting it somewhere and it sounded more ‘meta’ than that) of Anaconda was the first to brave following in its wake, and I guess it was some kind of counter-programming to release a ping pong biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme. Also out was youth-aimed video game horror sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2; James L. Brooks’s first directorial effort for a decade-and-a-half, Ella McCay; Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great; and a bunch of other stuff even less worthy of a mention (or I’ve forgotten why it’s on my short list and probably should have Googled it, you choose). Oh, and a pre-Netflix theatrical debut for Kate Winslet’s Goodbye June, which also then came to Netflix within the month.

Speaking of Netflix (yeah, I did a link), the biggest streaming debut of the month was undoubtedly the new Knives Out Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, but I actually saw that, so, um, moving on… Honestly, though, there’s not much else worth mentioning. I mean, Prime Video’s dog-based romcom Merv goes on my watchlist because I like dogs, Charlie Cox, and Zooey Deschanel, but it’s hardly a high-profile must-see, right? Though I feel like it’s a better bet than the film they did push, Michelle Pfeiffer-starring Christmas comedy Oh. What. Fun. I’m certainly not going to catch up with that in January.

There was more noteworthy stuff making its post-theatrical streaming debut, as a few big(ish) guns were wheeled out for the holiday season. I suppose chief among them was A Minecraft Movie on Sky Cinema / NOW, what with it being one of the biggest hits of the year. Joining it there was franchise-amalgamating legacy sequel Karate Kid: Legends (I feel like I need to finish Cobra Kai before that, even though I don’t think it directly follows on), Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (I’m three or four behind on new Anderson films now), Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (which I already own on disc), and, um, Tinsel Town, a probably-should-be-a-TV-special festive romp with Kiefer Sutherland slumming it (although, where’s his career at these days, so maybe not) alongside Danny Dyer, Rebel Wilson, Jason Manford, and Derek Jacobi. Feels kinda random, but there you go.

Elsewhere, Apple TV+ dropped F1: The Movie, the nearest I’ve come to watching a movie on my phone (the trailer with haptic feedback was cool. Don’t know if they’ve done a version of the whole movie with that… and even if they did, I wouldn’t actually watch a movie on my phone); and Disney+ made a bid for middle-brow British audiences with Olivia Colman- and Benedict Cumberbatch-starring remake The Roses. Looping back round to Amazon, we also find David Mackenzie’s thriller Relay and a couple of those “it’s now in the public domain so we can make it into a horror movie” films, Bambi: The Reckoning and Popeye the Slayer Man. I guess we’re going to be seeing those pop up for years to come. Their existence amuses me, but I have no desire to watch any of them. Talking of rubbish, they also offered the new Red Sonja, which I rented for actual money (albeit discounted) and watched just last month. If I’d known it was coming as part of my Prime subscription, I wouldn’t have bothered… which I guess is why they don’t warn you.

Things that caught my attention among the back catalogue shifts included Netflix simultaneously adding both 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas and 2018’s The Grinch, which stood out because I’ve never read or seen any version of that story, which caused me to get a question wrong in a work Christmas quiz (his dog is called Max, FYI). More significantly, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is now on iPlayer (I wonder if they considered holding off on it ’til Wimbledon season), and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is now on Prime — not truly a ‘significant’ film, but I did enjoy the first one. There are just so many superhero movies around nowadays, I never really know where to start with catching up… or, more accurately, don’t feel enough desire to dive into them. Maybe I should just give in and watch the key ones? But I digress.

As for my usual roundup of “stuff I own on disc but haven’t watched that is now also on streaming to remind me of my self-control problems”… well, the king of this category is Prime Video, and there I spy David Cronenberg’s The Brood, the 2021 Candyman, poliziotteschi Rulers of the City, and Voodoo Macbeth, plus a tonne of stuff I’ve meant to rewatch, a sampling of which includes Annihilation, Black Hawk Down, Collateral, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, The Limey, Man on Fire, The Prestige, Saving Private Ryan, David Cronenberg’s Scanners… and that’s not even all of them. iPlayer gave them a run for their money this month, though, with Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, Get Carter (the original, obv), How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (they always show those at Christmas, for some reason), Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and both Puss in Boots and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. But they also dove into the rewatch category, with the likes of Double Indemnity, The Godfather trilogy (including the Coda version of Part III, which I’ve never seen), Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (which I feel like pops on one service or another every month), The Third Man, and Unforgiven. It’s not news but, yeah, I should buy less stuff.

And I… am still buying stuff, of course, but I feel like this list isn’t as long as it used to be. Nearly everything is in 4K this month too, which is nice. The only exceptions are Masters of Cinema’s box set of 1960s Fantômas films, Fantomas Returns!, and the BFI’s recent release Battleship Potemkin with a score by the Pet Shop Boys. Elsewise, there’s a surprising amount of horror: giallo The House with Laughing Windows (an import of Arrow’s US release rather than settling for the UK equivalent); H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Re-Animator; Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil (which is also bundled with another Lovecraft adaptation, Color Out of Space); and a pair of Hammer horrors released by StudioCanal, The Horror of Frankenstein and Scars of Dracula; plus a non-horror title from Hammer themselves, crime drama Whispering Smith Hits London. Further on the non-horror front, Dust Devil was an import from Umbrella in Australia, which I accompanied with their releases of Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and the second film from Cube director Vincenzo Natali, Cypher.

We finish the month with a third David Cronenberg: Criterion’s release of A History of Violence, which I don’t think I’ve watched since I saw it at the cinema back in 2005, despite owning it on DVD for most of that time. Well, a 4K release is the perfect excuse for a rewatch, isn’t it? Right after I get to the hundreds of other things I’ve said that about…

November’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 not be summer anymore, but there were still plenty of blockbuster-sized releases at the multiplex. The biggest of them seems to be Disney’s latest animation, Zootropolis 2 (aka Zootopia 2), which has apparently broken records of some kind (I confess, I didn’t read the articles, just saw the headlines). I liked the first a lot (9½ years ago! Time flies), so I look forward to catching the sequel at some point. Other sequels included a third Predator flick (and second this year) from director Dan Trachtenberg, Predator: Badlands, which seemed to be as well-received as his previous two; belated magic/heist threequel Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, finally using the subtitle everyone said should’ve been on the second film; Nazi-killing followup Sisu: Road to Revenge; musical second act Wicked: For Good; and a limited release for the third Benoit Blanc murder mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, ahead of its Netflix release at the end of next week.

Not technically a sequel, but still very much in the IP space thanks to being both an adaptation of a Stephen King story and a remake of the previous Arnie-starring adaptation, was Edgar Wright’s latest, The Running Man. Other films with noteworthy pedigrees included Sky Original Nuremberg starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, among others, which received a rare wide release for a streamer-branded film; Richard Linklater’s latest (finished) film, Blue Moon; Sydney Sweeney-starring boxing biopic Christy; the debut feature directed by Ronan Day-Lewis, starring his dad, Anemone; and a whole host of recognisable British faces in The Choral, the fourth film from the writer/director pairing of Alan Bennett / Nicholas Hytner.

For those not keen in venturing out in these colder days, the streamers offered up a batch of brand-new titles as well, although their perceptible quality is as variable as ever. I mean, for every well-reviewed film like Netflix’s Train Dreams, there’s a pile of churn like Prime Video’s action-comedies Bride Hard (probably the worst wannabe-pun title I’ve ever heard) and Playdate, a vehicle for the star of their Jack Reacher show, Alan Ritchson. Apple TV+’s The Family Plan 2 appears to be in a similar vein. At least Netflix’s other original offering, Jingle Bell Heist, has the good grace to be festive-themed.

Plenty of new-to-streaming stuff here and there, too. The one that intrigues me the most, in its way, is After the Hunt. I didn’t see any fanfare for this when it was in cinemas, nor when it came to Prime in the middle of the month, despite a starry cast and being directed by Luca Guadagnino. Is that because it’s bad, or just not discourse-provoking? No idea. Could be it’s just me, because when I did spot it on Prime it was apparently in their top ten films, so someone noticed it. Also on Prime: actioner Boy Kills World and “dark fantasy comedy horror” (Wikipedia’s sting of genres, not mine) Death of a Unicorn. Over on NOW, a reminder that I bought but haven’t watched Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, plus the latest from Christopher “Happy Death Day” Langdon, Drop, and video game horror adaptation Until Dawn. The most I noted from Netflix was Trump biopic The Apprentice, but Disney+ actually had a couple of things worth mentioning in the shape of The Fantastic Four: First Steps (though I’m so many Marvel films behind I can’t remember the number anymore, so I don’t know how soon I’m likely to watch it) and Freakier Friday (though it’s decades since I saw its predecessor, and I wasn’t clamouring for a followup).

As ever, tonnes of back catalogue additions and service-hoppers made my long-list of stuff to mention, but a couple seemed worthy of particular note: The Perks of Being a Wallflower on Netflix, purely because it’s one of the most popular films on Letterboxd that I’ve never seen, but it also never seems to be streaming anywhere (and I hardly care about it enough to watch it any other way — in fact, I might not even get round to it now, who knows); and Fellini’s La Strada on Prime, which has a slightly more prestigious Letterboxd pedigree of being on the Top 250 there, but is another one that isn’t regularly readily available.

But, as usual, the most egregious older titles were all the reminders of stuff I own on disc but haven’t watched — like Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, the reboot of Candyman, Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, Neil Armstrong biopic First Man (all Amazon, though Candyman was also on iPlayer) — or titles I’ve bought because I thought they were great and want to rewatch them, but again haven’t — like Oliver Stone’s JFK and Natural Born Killers, John Frankenheimer’s Ronin, David Cronenberg’s Scanners (also all Amazon. Their offering is rather underrated, you know, and I think it’s their own fault because they make it harder to use than Netflix, burying the good stuff under piles of random crap. Though it’s also partly user error, as so many people can’t seem to get their head around the fact you can rent films in addition to those you get as a subscriber).

Nonetheless, I keep buying stuff that’s destined to end up on future iterations of that list. This month, it was Arrow’s 4K re-release of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (upgrading my existing Blu-ray copy of that same version), Criterion’s 4K re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (also upgrading my Blu-ray copy of the same), the 4K release of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (a leap up from the old DVD, at least), and The Goonies, a purchase prompted by, of all things, the tie-in LEGO set (which I did not buy because, although it looks cool, it’s expensive and I don’t love the film that much).

Of course, I also shelled out for piles (literally) of things I’ve never seen. Chief among them was Arrow’s release of City on Fire, signalling the start of their deal to release Golden Princess films in the UK, which in the future will bring us solid-gold classics like The Killer, Hard Boiled, and… well, potentially 153 more, according to news of the original deal (Shout have the US rights and Arrow’s is a sublicense). Maybe we’ll see some box sets like their Shawscope series, which this month added a Volume 4 with 16 new films to supplement the 40 already released across the first three sets.

As usual, most of my purchases this month came courtesy of boutique labels, whether they be new releases or sale pickups. From Eureka, two additions to the Masters of Cinema series: Michaelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte in 4K, and Kinji “Battle Royale” Fukasaku Shogun’s Samurai. From Deaf Crocodile (via an eBay seller, as the label won’t ship to the UK), the second volume of Treasures of Soviet Animation and “a wildly surreal early 1970s Lithuanian rock opera” that’s further described as a blend of Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof, and The Wicker Man (how could you resist that?!), The Devil’s Bride. From Criterion’s UK sale, noir Night Moves in 4K and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth on regular BD; and from Indicator’s sale, 4Ks of Ozploitation flicks Harlequin and Thirst, plus Love Affair-emulating melodrama When Tomorrow Comes and “British crime classic” (their words) The Shop at Sly Corner. Singleton purchases included a 4K upgrade for Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung’s Heart of Dragon, and the latest in Hammer’s line of collector’s editions, The Men of Sherwood Forest.

And that’s not even including all my recent Black Friday orders that haven’t arrived yet. They say the first step to solving a problem is recognising their is one… so I fully intend to carry on in self-denial for a while yet.