Tag Archives: Blu-ray

2025 Statistics!

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Here we go, people! It’s happening! Iiiiiiit’s… the statistics! (People cheer, fireworks explode, dogs and cats live together, etc, etc.)

But… before the onslaught of numbers and graphs begin, a reminder that these stats cover my first-time feature film watches from 2025, as listed here. Shorts and rewatches are only factored in when expressly mentioned. Also, as a Letterboxd Patron member, I get a yearly stats page there too. The numbers will look different because I also log (some) TV, and it factors in shorts and rewatches more thoroughly — but that’s all part of what makes it worthwhile as an addition to this post. Plus, it includes some interesting things that I don’t, like my most-watched and highest-rated stars and directors. More stats are always good, right?

Speaking of which, for the first time since 2018, this post includes a new graph. Oooh! What could it be?! Well, it’s a special and unusual one — not necessarily one I’ll include every year going forward (though, hey, never say never), but something that speaks to this year in particular. It’s coming up relatively early on, so you won’t have to endure my crypticness for too long.

But I know you’re really champing at the bit to get started after that revelation, so let’s crack on…

I watched 116 feature films for the first time in 2025. That’s down on 131 from last year, but up on every other year since my relaunch in 2022 (and it’s massively down on the years before that, hence treating the relaunch as some kind of cutoff). Overall, for size it ranks 12th out of all 19 years.

Of those 116, 88 counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge. I did complete my Challenge this year (check out the Final Standing post and December review for more on that), with the remainder being 12 rewatches. That was all of my rewatches this year though, my lowest total in a decade — no wonder it was after that year (2016) that I started to make a conscious effort to rewatch stuff. Do I need to make even more of an effort, or is the 12 required by the Challenge an adequate amount? Something I’ll think on.


NB: I have no rewatch data for 2007 and incomplete numbers for 2008.

Here’s how that viewing played out across the year, month by month. The dark blue line is my first-time watches and the pale blue is rewatches. As you can see, things started out nice and flat, hitting my ten-films-per-month minimum goal consistently, but then it goes kinda crazy. I’m not sure there was a specific reason why. It would be nice to see no months dropping below that ten line, though, and more spiking above it wouldn’t hurt.

I also watched six short films. That’s thoroughly unexceptional: not my worst year; far from my best; down quite a lot (relatively) on the last two years. Of course, I don’t make a specific effort to watch shorts — if I did, I’m sure they’d be higher. Maybe I should? Maybe it’s not worth it?

The total running time of my first-watch features was 189 hours and 35 minutes. That places the year 13th overall. It’s unusual for the running time position to not match the film total position, which suggests I overall watched shorter films this year. Thinking back over the kind of films I chose to watch and how I made decisions (a lot of “what can I squeeze in?”), that doesn’t really surprise me. If anything, it surprises me that it doesn’t happen more often… although, if I do that every year, it wouldn’t change anything in comparison, so maybe it’s not surprising. Add in the shorts and that rises by just under an hour-and-a-half, to 191 hours and 3 minutes. (The additional bit is labelled as “other” on the graph because it used to include alternate cuts of features that I watched for the first time but didn’t count towards the main tally. It’s been many years now since there were any, but I’d have to go back and recalculate most a dozen or more recorded years to make this shorts-only.)

One thing I’ve noted in a couple of monthly reviews throughout 2025 is how much time I’ve spent on specific non-film things — primarily, watching Critical Role (although that began, and was even more prevalent, in 2024) and playing Skyrim. So, I thought it would be fun to throw in a new graph for comparison purposes: how much time I spent watching films (for this graph I’ve also added in the 12 rewatches), how much time I spent watching Critical Role content (main campaign episodes, miniseries, one-shots, and chat shows like Talks Machina and Cooldown), and how much time I spent playing Skyrim (which, importantly, is just for two months, because I only started it in early November).

But what if those two months of Skyrim had been the same for the whole year? Well…

Well, crikey. Is that what 2026 will look like? Will I really play another 660+ hours of Skyrim? I doubt it… but you never know: there are reported playtimes that surpass 725 hours, and that’s just people who’ve bothered to log it on HowLongToBeat. And even if it’s not Skyrim, I feel like I’ve caught the bug of playing big open-world RPGs, of which I already own several more. It might seem silly to call a games console “life changing” but, well, getting a Steam Deck has certainly changed what I spend large chunks of my life doing.

Alright, let’s shift the focus back to films, but sticking with technology: the ways in which I watched those films. For one brief, glorious moment I thought Blu-ray was finally the victor in this category (it last topped it in 2014)… then I counted streaming properly and it just had the edge. And then I remembered that nowadays I combine streams and downloads into digital, which wins easily with 60 films. I realise this is the end result of my own viewing choices, not some external fact I can’t control, but I watch what I want to watch where I can currently get it, and the convenience of streaming clearly wins out too often (not to mention streaming exclusives. I mean, if I waited for disc to watch Wake Up Dead Man, there’s a high chance I’d never ever see it). Anyway, digital sits at its lowest percentage (51.7%) since 2019, which was the last time it was below 50%, so maybe next year.

As noted, “digital” encompasses multiple different platforms and methods. The top one this year was Amazon Prime Video with 15 films (25% of digital), knocking downloads into a close second with 14 films (23.3%). That means the otherwise-ubiquitous Netflix charts third with 11 films (18.3% — or just 9.5% of all first-time watches), with NOW next on seven films (11.67%), and the numbers rounding out with Disney+ on four (6.67%), iPlayer and Tubi on 3 apiece (5%), YouTube on two (3.3%), and one from MUBI (1.67%).

In overall second place was Blu-ray, with its 45 films (38.8%) representing the format’s highest number since 2021 and best percentage share since 2013. I’d say that’s something to build on, but I know from experience that what happens one year rarely has any bearing on the next.

DVD saw a slight uptick this year, totalling nine films (7.8%), which is close to the figure from 2022 and 2023. It hasn’t been in double figures since 2018, and hasn’t been above 10% of my viewing since 2014, so the less I think about how many hundreds of them I have unwatched, the better.

After popping back into contention with one film last year, TV’s disappeared again. I hardly watch anything on live TV fullstop nowadays — even when something’s on the BBC, I’m more likely to catch up with it on my own schedule via iPlayer — so no surprise I don’t watch any films that way anymore. If you’d still like to see a graph, there’s one in last year’s stats.

Instead, let’s move on to the final format left with something to actually record: cinema. I doubled my cinema trips this year… to two. Those would be a theatrical-only release of the filmed version of the stage production of Macbeth starring David Tennant, and the final Mission: Impossible movie. And, to be honest, very little else even tempted me to consider heading out to the cinema. Am I a bad film fan? Was everything this year that uninspiring? I’m not sure. Either way, I’m certainly not going to attempt any kind of commitment to improve that going forward.

Sticking with formats for a minute, first the disappointing news that I only watched 2 films in 3D. We can debate the death and decline of the format all you want (no one’s trying to claim it’s not well past its zeitgeist, but a lot of big movies still seem to get 3D versions theatrically), but I have plenty of discs unwatched, so I ought to make an effort to pump those numbers up.

A different ‘future of home viewing’ format is having opposite fortunes: this year, 39 of the new films I watched were in 4K Ultra HD. At just over a third of my total viewing — 33.6% to be precise — it’s its strongest year yet. Still, 1080p HD remains the standard, at 61 films (52.6%), while SD somehow clings in there with 16 films (13.8%). As much as it might seem like “everything’s HD nowadays”, DVD was a far bigger and more diverse format than anything else (bigger than Blu-ray, certainly, and more diverse than streaming offerings, certainly), so — despite all the random stuff that gets 4K upgrades nowadays — of course there’s a lot out there stuck in SD quality, and perhaps always will be. Unless you exclusively watch new releases, SD’s going to be a fact of viewing for a long time yet; perhaps forever.

Moving on to time now, and in 2025 I watched something from every decade since 1900 for the first time since 2022. Okay, the 1900s were only represented by a single short film, but there weren’t any features that decade anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the top decade was — as usual — the current one, i.e. the 2020s, with 33 films (28.45%). That’s actually the lowest percentage for the current decade since 2021, when they were still beaten by the 2010s (which also had a lower percentage — they kind of split the ‘recency’ that year).

Rather than a single other period coming close, it seems my viewing has been spread around, because second-place the 1970s had under half as many films, 16 (13.8%). Right on its tail is the ’60s with 15 (12.9%), and not far behind that is the ’80s on 13 (11.2%).

Only then, in fifth place, do we finally find the 2010s, with 10 films (8.62%), while sixth place is a three-way tie between the 1920s, 1990s, and 2000s, each with (appropriately enough) six films (5.2%). Rounding things out are the 1950s on five (4.3%), the 1940s on three (2.6%), the 1930s on two (1.7%), and the 1910s on one (0.9%).

Honestly, I’m almost surprised the 2020s remain so high, considering how few new films it feels like I’m watching; although, as it’s less than a third overall, I guess that still makes sense.

Unfortunately, such upending of norms (okay, maybe that wasn’t an “upending”, but tweaking) doesn’t extend to countries of production, where the USA dominates as always with 59 films, aka 50.9%, which sees it slip back above 50% after dropping below it for the first time last year. Still, that’s its second-lowest percentage since I began recording this, so that’s something… although, on the other hand, the total of 19 countries is down from 31 last year. You win some, you lose some.

Another for the former camp was good old Blighty, with the UK hitting its highest percentage yet at 37.1% from 43 films. All those poliziotteschi I watched for the Challenge helped Italy overleap France for third place, with a total of 15 films (12.9%), although our Gallic cousins still came fourth, with 11 films (9.5%). Continuing down the chart we find Japan on eight (6.9%), Germany on six (5.2%), Canada and Sweden each with three (2.6%), and Australia, Hong Kong, and Spain on two (1.7%) apiece, before eight further countries each have one film (0.9%), the sole total newcomer to my viewing history being Uganda.

Unsurprisingly, English remains unassailably dominant for languages, featuring significantly in 88 films (75.9%) — although, as it’s only ever dipped below three-quarters once before, getting almost that low isn’t a bad result. A distant second was Italian with 11 (9.5%), those poliziotteschi once again helping to rearrange the usual rankings. The only other languages represented in multiple films were Japanese in seven (6%) and French in six (5.2%). There were 10 other languages in one film each, with uncommon ones for my viewing including Finnish, Irish Gaelic, Luganda, Norse, and Welsh.

A total of 101 directors and seven directing partnerships helmed the feature films I watched in 2025, plus one film with no credited director of any kind. For the first time in three years, two of those directors helmed more than two films: top was Fernando Di Leo with four (all poliziotteschi), followed by Tatsuya Oishi with three (the Kizumonogatari trilogy). The other directors with multiples (two apiece) were Alfred Hitchcock and (for the second year in a row) Robert Tronson (both being entries in the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series, same as last year).

As for women, this year I watched 11 films with a female director, which, when you adjust for those co-directed with a man, comes to merely 8.2% of my viewing — up from last year, and a lot better than it was when I started tracking this in the mid-2010s, but still not great. Indeed, on a percentage basis, it’s my third best year (2020 and 2023 managed to nudge above 11%). I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating every year: I neither avoid nor seek out female directors; I just watch the films I watch and see what number comes out at the end. The industry, undoubtedly, still needs to do more. I hope this graph will continue to improve in the future; but you can’t change the past, so as someone who watches a lot of older films, I can’t imagine it will ever reach 50/50.

Last year, I made furthering my progress with the IMDb Top 250 part of my Challenge. I did make solid progress, but not enough to get it completed: by the beginning of January 2025, I still had ten films left. Sadly, I can’t say I kept up that momentum, as only one film from my 2025 viewing appears on the chart at time of writing — The Wild Robot at 181st. And because that list is ever-changing, the number I have left to see has actually gone up, and now sits at 15. It’s kind of frustrating, but also indicative of the fact that the list of ‘great movies’ is never truly set in stone.

Another mediocre effort at progressing lists comes as we turn our attention to the “50 Unseen”, the list I publish each year of 50 notable films I missed from that year’s new releases. I’ve continued to track my progress with all of those lists as the years have passed, and in 2025 I watched 14 films across all 18 lists. That’s up from 10 last year, but doesn’t match the 20 from the year before, which was already one of my weaker years (I didn’t have the heart to see how this year compared further back). Those 14 were quite spread around amongst the various years, with the single largest being six from 2024’s 50, i.e. last year’s list. That means 2025 ties with 2023 as the second-worst ‘first year’ ever, the one time I’ve done worse being the pitiful four I watched in 2009 from 2008’s list.

In total, I’ve now seen 557 out of 900 ‘missed’ movies. That’s 61.9%, continuing the decline this has been experiencing since 2022 — it’s one negative side effect of my new Challenge, because I used to pay a fair amount of attention to these, whereas now my focus is on Challenge-qualifying films, where “50 Unseen” titles make up only one ten-film category. The ability to switch around what’s included in the Challenge is within my power, of course, but to get these back above 70% (where it sat from 2018 to 2021) I’d have to watch 108 of them, so even if I wanted to let it take over my entire 100-film Challenge (which I don’t, really) it still wouldn’t do the job. Oh well. (As usual, the 50 for 2025 will be listed in my “best of” post.)

And, before you know it, we’ve reached the end! Well, the climax, at any rate — the final set of stats. I’m talking, of course, about the scores.

As you may have noticed, I didn’t post a single film review in 2025, but I scored every new film I watched nonetheless. That does mean my precise ratings are flexible until I lock them in by posting a review. Most will still say the same, but there are plenty of films I awarded a half-star on Letterboxd, and as I insist on rounding to a whole star for the blog, some of those have the potential to shift in the other direction (because a half-star doesn’t mean it should automatically round up. I mean, it might’ve already been rounded from, say, 3.3 to 3.5, right? But I really don’t want to start getting that granular with my ratings). Anyway, for the sake of completing these stats, I’ve assigned a whole-star rating to every film, and while it’s theoretically possible I’ll change my mind when I eventually post a review, I’m sure this section will remain broadly accurate.

Beginning with the cream of the crop, in 2025 I awarded just four five-star ratings (3.45% of my viewing), the lowest number ever. Raw numbers and percentages can paint very different pictures (four from 116 films is statistically pretty different than if it were from the 264 films I watched in 2020), but even then it’s well below where this figure sits on average, which is above 15%. Well, it is what it is — I don’t grade with the intention of hitting the same curve every year, so my 2025 viewing was simply lacking in this regard.

That said, other scores remain typically healthy. The most common score was four stars, which I handed out to 54 films (46.6%). That’s marginally above the historical average of 44.8%, but is also lower than seven previous years, so sits in the upper-middle overall. Not too far behind were the 45 three-star films (38.8%). Only once have the three-stars overtaken four-stars to be the dominant rating (in 2012), although they have been within a few percentage points of each other sometimes. This year, the difference of 7.8% is towards the closer end (five years were even closer), so while it’s not the greatest year, it’s not the most mediocre either.

As for the actually ‘bad’ ratings, there were 12 two-star films (10.34%) and only a single one-star film (0.9%). In fact, I almost didn’t give out any one-star ratings this year, which would have made 2025 just the third year where that happened; but then I decided Ice Age: Collision Course really was terrible enough that two stars would be too generous, so here we are.

That brings us the average score — a single figure to quantify 2025’s quality compared to other years. The short version is 3.4 out of 5. That might not sound terrible — it’s still above the halfway point of 2.5 or the notional average of 3.0 — but it’s actually only the second time my annual average has been below 3.5. Being one of the two weakest years of the past almost-two-decades is, well, not good. It’s not the lowest of all, though: if we add a few more decimal places, we see 2025 averaged 3.414, which is still notably high than 2012, which at 3.352 was a smidgen off rounding to 3.3. Still, it represents a further tick down for the line.

Honestly, I’m not surprised: it’s felt like a very “decent but not great” year throughout, a perception which is supported by the still-solid number of 4-star films but almost total absence of 5-stars. That’s the way it goes sometimes, although 2025 has demonstrably been worse for it than normal. It does make me wonder if next year I should put more energy into seeking out better-regarded films. Not that that’s a guarantee of success (I’ve bounced off plenty of highly-acclaimed classics and, conversely, loved my fair share of less-beloved cult classics and other people’s write-offs), but it improves the odds. Either way, we’ll see what 2026 brings this time next year.


More quantifying of quality as I distil those 116 first-time watches to my favourite 10%.

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.

October’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.

With summer well and truly over, it seems like an unexceptional month at the multiplex. That’s not to say there are no good films, just few that truly felt like A Big Deal. The one being most written about, at least as far as I saw, was a low-budget indie horror… starring a dog: Good Boy. I’m assured the eponymous doggo doesn’t die, and therefore I shall be watching it when it hits one streamer or another. Other horrors gracing the big screen in ‘Halloween month’ included Him, Black Phone 2, and Shelby Oaks.

The anti-Good Boy in terms of buzz was After the Hunt — despite being a new film from director Luca Guadagnino starring names like Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edibiri, I had to check more than once that it had actually been released and not delayed or something. The era of the movie star may be over (allegedly), but there were still plenty of famous faces to be found: Emma Stone as a bald possible-alien in Bugonia; Dwayne Johnson making a bid for legitimacy in wrestling biopic The Smashing Machine; Channing Tatum headlining crime biopic comedy Roofman; and Jared Leto continuing to be box office poison as Disney tried once again to make Tron into A Thing with Tron: Ares. This year’s mandatory music biopic was Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. I believe David Mackenzie’s Relay was also released, over a year after its TIFF premiere, but that’s another one with so little chatter that I can’t be certain. (I guess I could confirm this by scouring film listings or whatever, but, believe it or not, I don’t actually put that much effort into these lists.)

As the days get cold, the nights draw in, and many people would rather stay home in front of the telly, so the streamers start wheeling out bigger name originals, too. Well, most of them: the most Disney+ bothered to put forward was a remake of 1992 thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Quite who decided that was necessary or worthwhile (it’s hardly a big-name IP, is it?), I don’t know. I guess they think that kind of thing is a better use of money than, say, another season of Doctor Who, but who am I to judge. (I mean, at least Who has a certain level of dedicated fans who’ll stick with it however bad it gets. But I digress… and I’m not exactly sad about the Disney partnership ending anyway, so…)

For me, Prime Video nailed the biggest release of the month right at the start, with Shane Black being let out of director jail post-The Predator for heist action thriller Play Dirty. I don’t think the notices were that strong, but Black hits often enough for me to at least give it a go. The film is the ninth theatrical outing for literary anti-hero Parker, but you’d probably have to be a dedicated fan to know that because each one of those was a standalone offering and they’re spread across the last 60 years. Other titles catching my eye on Prime included The Ritual, starring Al Pacino and Dan Stevens as an old priest and a young priest performing an exorcism — hmm, sounds familiar… Apparently it did have a theatrical release back in May, but it could have been branded an original for all the awareness I had of it. Another “may or may not be the UK premiere” drop was Rust, aka that Alec Baldwin film. David Ehrlich has written what I suspect will be the definitive review of it, and I don’t think we need to say anything more about it.

Over on Netflix, the big-name title was a new film from Katherine Bigelow — her first since Detroit, eight years ago. A House of Dynamite sounds like a do-over of Cold War thriller Fail-Safe, but maybe it isn’t because I’ve not seen that comparison made as often as I expected to (or maybe I’m just out of the loop on stuff. Entirely possible). Another under-the-radar title (again, as far as I’m concerned) was Ballad of a Small Player, staring Colin Farrell and directed by Edward Berger, who’s managed to win the Best Film BAFTA for his last two directorial efforts — All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave — so, you never know, maybe this will suddenly swoop into the awards season conversation too (I have absolutely no idea). One film I know was a surprise, because I have seen others say it was a surprise, is spin-off The Rats: A Witcher Tale. You could argue it’s a TV special, what with it only scraping feature-length at 82 minutes, and apparently serving as some kind of bridge between season three and four of its parent show, but I’m not sure that distinction really means anything anymore anyway (and I’ve long advocated for the blurring/removal of the line). Finally, there was a new animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book The Twits — or, per the film’s tagline, an adaptation of the characters rather than the book itself. Whatever.

If we turn to films making their post-theatrical subscription streaming debut, there’s really only one horse in the race: Sky Cinema. Headlined by romcom fourquel Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy at the start of the month, they ended it with sci-fi AI thriller Companion, and in between brought kid-friendly animation Dog Man, plus a pair of Steven Soderbergh flicks that were both in cinemas earlier this year: haunting horror Presence and period spy thriller Black Bag. Soderbergh makes films faster than I can watch them (remember when he retired? Ha!), but they always go on my list.

As always, I could go on forever if I started digging into stuff jumping services and back catalogue additions, but a few that particularly caught my attention were Inside Llewyn Davis on Netflix, Jiro Dreams of Sushi on Prime, and If Beale Street Could Talk on iPlayer — it’s on and off there all the time, but if I mention it there’s a chance that’ll prompt me to finally watch it. For that same reason, this month’s reminders of stuff I own on unwatched discs included All the President’s Men (the third time it’s been a failure this year), the Back to the Future trilogy (how long ago did those 4Ks first come out? I dread to think), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Heat (also a three-time failure in 2025), The Train, folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (all three-and-a-quarter hours of it), a whole bunch of actual horrors — Deep Red, Don’t Look Now, Halloween 2018, The Haunting, The Others, Lovecraft fan film The Whisperer in Darkness — plus Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise, and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood.

I could go on, but that feels like enough of that — let’s instead talk about all the new stuff I’ve bought. Mmm, shiny! Especially shiny were the abundance of new-release 4K UHD titles I’ve picked up recently, including both recent theatrical titles — Jurassic World Rebirth, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and James Gunn’s Superman — and new editions of catalogue titles. The latter include a couple of major studio releases — Dead of Night from StudioCanal; The Rocky Horror Picture Show from Disney (it still feels wrong that Disney own Rocky Horror now) — but mostly come from a variety of boutique labels: The Crimson Rivers from Curzon; The Curse of Frankenstein from Hammer; Daughters of Darkness from Radiance; In the Mouth of Madness and Outland from Arrow. Plus, not brand-new but picked up in their current sale, Jean Rollin titles Requiem for a Vampire and The Escapees from Indicator (I’ve ordered more, but they’ll arrive on Monday and thus into next month’s update. Unless I watch them, of course. Haha.)

Similarly, I snagged Eureka’s 4K edition of The Old Dark House just before their site sold out of copies; and, at the same time, grabbed literally the last copy of their three-film set Martial Law: Lo Wei’s Wuxia World. Also from Eureka, another expansive box set of martial arts action in Furious Swords and Fantastic Warriors: The Heroic Cinema of Chang Cheh, containing ten films directed by the “one of the most prolific and accomplished directors ever to emerge from the Hong Kong film industry.” And on a slightly different tack, Larry Cohen’s The Ambulance, which I vaguely remember someone recommending for some reason many years ago — honestly, that kind of “some random person once said this was good” feels like my motivation for a surprisingly large number of my buying/viewing choices.

Those aforementioned Indicator sale 4Ks (remember, two paragraphs back) were joined by a couple of regular Blu-rays: Marlene Dietrich pre-Code melodrama The Song of Songs and Edward Dmytryk’s “dark and unsettling journey into the mind of a murderer”, Obsession (aka The Hidden Room). More of those next month, too. And that lone Radiance 4K (even further back in the paragraph mentioned in the brackets in the previous sentence) was accompanied by their other new releases this month: also from Harry Kümel (the director of Daughters of Darkness), Malpertuis; François Truffaut’s childhood summer drama Pocket Money; and a second box set of Japanese ghost stories in Daiei Gothic Vol. 2.

If you go back over the last three paragraphs of purchases, you’ll count quite a few horror and fantastical titles — makes sense to release those just in time for Halloween. Would’ve made sense to watch them around this time, too. What an innovative concept. Maybe next year. Or, knowing me, in three or four or ten years’ time. Or never, whatever.

September’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’ve heard good things about a couple of last month’s theatrical releases: Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, One Battle After Another, which seems to be being hailed as a film of all-time-level greatness; and Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk, which maybe can’t equal that level of rapturousness, but I’ve nonetheless heard is good. I’ve heard not a word said about Downton Abbey finale Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, which I guess means it hasn’t offended anyone, but also isn’t the cultural behemoth it was back when it was on TV, or even when the first movie landed. The same could perhaps be said for the belated theatrical release of Hamilton, massively undercut as it was by being on Disney+ for over five years now. It would be nice if a disc release were to follow. Talking of belated, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues arrived just 41 years after its predecessor, and seems to have gone down about as well as you’d predict — i.e. not very.

Also filling screens with various levels of noteworthiness this month were the latest from 50% of the Coen brothers, Honey Don’t!; the fourth (I think?) and final Conjuring, The Conjuring: Last Rites; and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, which I don’t really know anything about except it has a starry-ish cast (Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and therefore probably merits a mention on some level.

Of more note, going direct to streaming (or maybe it had a theatrical release, I don’t know; I certainly didn’t register one) was Spike Lee’s latest, a modern-day remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Highest 2 Lowest, which is on Apple TV+ and so I really should watch it to justify the fact I keep forgetting to cancel my subscription (that and the new season of Slow Horses that’s currently airing… if “airing” is the right word for a direct-to-streaming series). The only other streaming original I noted this month was Liam Neeson action sequel Ice Road: Vengeance on Amazon Prime Video, the most noteworthy aspect of which was that I guess Ice Road was successful enough to warrant a sequel. Remember Ice Road? Me neither.

As for films making their subscription streaming premieres, Sky Cinema almost have a monopoly this month, with a varied selection that encompassed one time Oscar frontrunner The Brutalist, horror reimagining Wolf Man, well-reviewed action-comedy Novocaine, and poorly-reviewed action-comedy Love Hurts. Also Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, but I bought that on disc a while back so it’s a different kind of failure on my part. In a less R-rated bracket, Disney+ offered up the live-action Lilo & Stitch. I tend more towards the “but why?” side of the debate on these live-action do-overs, and I didn’t much care for the original Lilo & Stitch anyway, so this one is a long, long way down my watchlist.

Some films reminded me they exist by flipping services, like popular romcom Anyone But You jumping from Sky Cinema to Netflix, or the Prime Original remake of Road House rocking up on iPlayer via a terrestrial TV screening. Back catalogue additions in general are just reminders of stuff I haven’t quite got round to, like Bones and All and Tár, both also on iPlayer; or Minari and Megalopolis on MUBI (ooh, alliterative). Heck, I’d include Selma on that list, and that premiered almost eleven years ago. A whole decade plus one year! Where does time go?!

In a similar vein, there were plenty of reminders of discs I’ve bought and not watched, the worst-feeling (at least for me) being stuff I’ve been meaning to revisit for ages, gleefully upgraded to 4K, and then still not got round to. There’s a double helping of Francis Ford Coppola in that bracket across The Godfather trilogy and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, while other titles alongside them include RoboCop, RoboCop 2, Schindler’s List, Training Day, and The Usual Suspects.

Nonetheless, I still fork over the cash for brand-new 4K upgrades; though I do feel I’ve slightly reined myself in recently. Maybe not compared to regular folks, but compared to past-me. That said, there are still titles I jump on eagerly at order time but don’t when they actually drop through the door… although, in fairness, that’s because placing an order takes mere minutes while carving out time for multiple hours isn’t what it used to be. Anyway, getting Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World into the 4K club was most welcome — I owned the old Blu-ray, but that was a slightly begrudging purchase because it wasn’t meant to be very good, I just figured it would never get an upgrade. Apparently the 4K disc is splendid. Well, my Challenge has four rewatch slots still to go this year, and that’s high on my list of films I intend to fill them.

Other UHD purchases included John Wick sidequel Ballerina, a pair of old Hammer non-horrors, Blood Orange and The Man in Black, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy, and an upgrade for martial arts minor classic Come Drink with Me. As for regular Blu-rays, it’s mostly boutique stuff that, for one (understandable) reason or another, doesn’t merit a 4K disc, like the latest silent-era addition to the Masters of Cinema line, Finis Terrae, or Radiance’s fourth volume of world noir, World Noir Vol. 4.

Finally, a trio of box sets added a total of 18 films to my watch list; more if you count alternate versions. Two of those were from Anderson Entertainment, whose Super Space Theatre volumes collect the compilation films produced from episodes of Gerry Anderson TV shows; three Thunderbirds films in Volume One, and six Space: 1999 films in Volume Two, including one newly-created for this set, as well as Spazio: 1999, which was how Italian audiences first encountered the series, with a score by Ennio Morricone, no less. The remainder came from a belated pickup of Arrow’s V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal set, collecting nine features from Japanese studio Toei’s ’80s/’90s line of direct-to-video genre flicks. How “essential” is such a collection? I dunno, but it does sound kinda fun. Maybe some day I’ll actually get round to watching them and find out if they indeed are.

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.

Flavour of the month at the cinema was definitely the Liam Neeson-starring reboot of The Naked Gun. There was every reason to be dubious of this as an undertaking, but most of what I’ve read regarded it as a triumph. It’s not the kind of film I’ll rush to buy on disc (not that that’s any guarantee I’ll watch something quickly, as this column attests to every month), but I’m looking forward to it landing on streaming.

I’ve also got a general impression (because I just don’t read much new criticism in depth these days) that Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck is rather good, while horror Weapons and Ari Aster’s latest, Eddington, seem to have been divisive. That might be better than the net zero I’ve heard about Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, although that did only just come out and I’ve been busy lately. The consensus I garnered about Nobody 2 was it’s the kind of sequel that’s fundamentally more of the same, but the first one was pretty fun so that sounds alright to me. Certainly better than Materialists, which it felt like the whole internet was lambasting when it came out in the US the other month. Also out was belated (legacy?) sequel Freakier Friday, which I feel compelled to mention but not compelled to watch.

Meanwhile, breaking containment from the largely-online world of modern moviedom, I feel like I’ve seen The Roses all over the place in The Real World. It’s made me realise how weird that feels for a film nowadays; like they’ve given up on targeting Regular People and are just happy with the guaranteed crowd. Or maybe I just don’t look in the right places and The Roses has been ubiquitous. I mean, it does star Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, who are both mainstream darlings (not undeservedly) in the UK. If anything’s going to tempt out your not-a-regular-moviegoer, that’s a combo worth pushing.

The opposite of advertised has been KPop Demon Hunters. Yes, that’s how it’s spelt, despite K-pop being spelt, well, “K-pop” and the logo kinda having a hyphen in it too. (I get that most people don’t care about this kind of thing. I do, though.) It came out months ago but I didn’t mention it because it’s not my kind of thing; seemingly just another CG-animated kids’ movie dumped on Netflix, of which there seem to be dozens every year. Whether this one is actually good or just hit the right spot at the right time, I don’t know, but it’s become a bit of a phenomenon. Just this past weekend, it claimed the crown of the most-watched movie on Netflix ever, while the weekend before the limited theatrical release of a singalong version won the box office in the US, another first for a Netflix film. I’m tempted to watch it to see what all the fuss is about. Stranger films than this have turned out to actually be good.

Comparatively, August’s new streaming offers are underwhelming. On Netflix: thriller Night Always Comes starring Vanessa Kirby, which has all of 55% on Rotten Tomatoes; and a new original animation from Genndy Tartakovsky, who once attracted cult-following-ish levels of esteem for work like Samurai Jack and the 2D Star Wars: Clone Wars series, but has now made Fixed, an adult-orientated comedy about a dog about to be neutered. That’s amassed 58%, at least. Mind you, those are figures Prime Video might be glad of, considering their action-comedy The Pickup with Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson sits on 25%. (I don’t put much stock in Rotten Tomatoes generally, but these scores at least indicate the dismal state of things.) Sitting between the two is Disney+’s heist thriller starring Samara Weaving, Eenie Meanie, with 44%. Now, that’s not great, but also it’s a heist thriller starring Samara Weaving, so I’m prepared to overlook the fact it might not be very good.

Perhaps of more note were films that started a subscription streaming stretch — an emphasis on sibilance there because, for whatever reason, most of the ones joining Sky Cinema / NOW seemed to start with an S: Saturday Night, September 5, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and The Surfer. Also Heart Eyes, because I guess something had to buck the trend. And The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, but as I own that on disc I class it as a different type of failure. Prime Video also had a share of newcomers, including Babygirl, Mark Wahlberg vehicle Flight Risk, Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, Luc Besson’s Dogman, and the Ultimate Cut of Caligula. Several more films did the ol’ service shuffle, with Meg 2: The Trench leaving Sky for Prime, The Iron Claw leaving Prime for Netflix, and Five Nights at Freddy’s joining Netflix from Sky.

As usual, other back catalogue additions reminded me of all the stuff I’ve bought on disc but not watched yet, whether that be films I’ve never seen — like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hackers, In the Heat of the Night, The Northman, or Now, Voyager (quite a spread of types and eras, which is nice to see) — or films I’ve seen before but own in shiny newer editions I’ve not yet played — like Collateral, Ex Machina, Galaxy Quest, The Godfather trilogy, Psycho, or Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Both of those lists are just a sampling, because (as we know) I buy far too much stuff.

And, naturally, I bought even more this month. That said, the stack is looking a little shorter than usual. Whether that’s a result of less interesting stuff coming out, or I’ve finally demonstrated some restraint, I’m not sure. Either way, I definitely wasn’t going to miss out on shiny new 4K UHD releases of all-timers like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Sunset Boulevard, as well as films I feel there’s a strong chance I’m going to enjoy, like Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and Michael Mann’s Thief. Rounding out the 4K selection was one of Radiance’s first forays into the format, French police noir The Inquisitor, which is paired with an HD copy of a similar work by the same director, Deadly Circuit, for extra value.

Also from the Radiance stable was a trio of ninja action in their second volume of Shinobi films. I also picked up a slightly-random threesome of titles in Indicator’s sale earlier in the month, namely their two-film El Vampiro set, plus Western Geronimo: An American Legend and WW2 epic Midway. Throw in a couple of Kickstarter rewards — silent documentary An Aleutian Adventure and Hal Hartley’s new film, Where to Land — and… that’s it. Yes, really. But lest you think I’m breaking my habit, know that I’ve already got stuff in the post that will surely feature here next month.

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.

Plenty of blockbusters hitting the good old summer release window this month, starting with Jurassic World Rebirth (I’d intended to use that as a prompt to finally get round to the previous Jurassic film, Dominion, but failed at that too), and continuing with outings from both major superhero houses: James Gunn’s Superman kicking off a new era for DC on the big screen, and Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps hoping to make people stop proclaiming the slow death of the MCU (as if the flood of news articles related to the next Avengers film still not having a screenplay, despite being deep into principal photography, hasn’t kept that up anyway. Maybe Marvel Studios should learn to make films properly).

Filling screens here and there between those big gun(n)s: a new David Cronenberg, The Shrouds; horror reboot I Know What You Did Last Summer; animated sequel The Bad Guys 2; and yet another attempt (goodness knows why) to turn the Smurfs into a viable franchise in the simply-titled Smurfs. The films in the first paragraph might’ve tempted me to actually get out to the cinema for once (if I hadn’t been so busy elsewhere), but this lot? Ha. (Okay, Cronenberg will make my to-see list eventually, but as a sometime scaredy-cat I prefer horror in the privacy of my own living room.)

One film that didn’t set the box office alight was belated Adam Sandler sequel Happy Gilmore 2 — because it went direct to Netflix, where it became their biggest opening ever (at least in the US), and thus proved they probably should’ve done a theatrical release instead of leaving all that money on the table. Will they ever learn? No, demonstrably not. I’m not a Sandler fan, and consequently I’ve never seen the first Happy Gilmore, so I’ve no plans to watch this new one. I hope his fans enjoyed it. I did watch the first The Old Guard however many years ago, though, and the not-as-belated-but-still-tardy sequel to that also turned up this month, imaginatively titled The Old Guard 2. I’m not sure I care enough to take the time, to be honest, especially as reviews have been less than stellar, and apparently it contains a bunch of setup for a third film that may never happen.

The only other direct-to-streaming premiere I noted in July was an even more bizarre choice: on Prime Video, a new version of War of the Worlds — yes, another one — but this time apparently crossed with Searching, because it’s all from the perspective of Ice Cube watching the alien invasion unfurl on his computer. I guess maybe they were trying to go for a modernised version of Orson Welles’s famous radio broadcast? I don’t know. I haven’t even got round to watching the BBC miniseries version from a few years ago, which at least was interesting for trying to do it properly as a Victorian period piece, so I very much doubt the Ice Cube version will be hitting my screen anytime soon.

While the other streamers didn’t bother to offer much brand-new, a few relatively big hitters made their subscription streaming bows, including the viral success (if not a box office one) that was Robbie Williams biopic Better Man (you know, the one where he’s played be a CGI monkey), which also came to Prime; Disney+ did their usual speedy cinema-to-streaming pipeline with spy thriller The Amateur; Netflix offered nonlinear rom-dram We Live in Time; and Sky Cinema / NOW fared best, as usual, magicking up Wicked (aka Wicked: Part I), Clint Eastwood’s well-reviewed courtroom thriller Juror #2, and, um, Kraven the Hunter. Hey, can’t win ’em all. And, heck, they also had even less noteworthy stuff than that, so it could be (indeed, was) worse. I mean, Rumours sounds kinda interesting, but its audience scores are terrible… though IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes voters are exceptionally dumb nowadays, so maybe that 75% critic score is worth bearing in mind.

Crappy recent superhero movies also feature in back catalogue changes. Well, where don’t they nowadays? Morbius — a Spider-verse spin-off even more poorly regarded than Kraven — popped onto Amazon; as did The Flash, reminding me that I have an itch to watch it even though it’s meant to be poor and everything I’ve seen from it looks shit. I was going to say that at least it would allow me to close out that era of DC’s cinematic universe, but I still haven’t watched Wonder Woman 1984 or Aquaman and the Forgettable Sequel Subtitle either. Other stuff of note on Prime included Trumbo, which never especially interested me before, but I’ve just been reading a book on the history of the Oscars which told some of his story so now I think maybe. It goes on the list, anyway. Same for Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which was So Good back when it first came out (I ranked it 4th for films I first saw in 2017, which was a hotly contested year), but after almost a further decade of Taika Waititi’s schtick, I wonder if it still plays as well? Talking of rewatches, Amazon also threw up Blade Runner: The Final Cut, a reminder that it was one of the earliest 4K discs I bought but I still haven’t watched that, and The Hobbit trilogy, a reminder that I own them in 3D but have never watched those copies, and it’s been a while since I watched them at all so maybe they deserve another look.

Over on Netflix, the “I should give that another look” theme continues with Forrest Gump, which I haven’t seen since I was a kid and should probably form an adult opinion on; plus more reminders of discs I bought with enthusiasm but still haven’t watched, like Heat and Minority Report (I don’t even want to look up how long ago the Blu-ray I haven’t watched came out. It’ll be on 4K before you know it). Similarly, though not actually a rewatch, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes — I really enjoyed the original trilogy quartet, and this prequel seemed to be well received (certainly successful enough that they’re immediately adapting the next book in the Hunger Games universe), so I ought to get on that too. In terms of stuff I don’t already own on disc, BlackBerry seems like it should be meritless attempt to engineer another Social Network / Steve Jobs kinda film, but I hear it’s actually good whenever it comes up.

iPlayer has a similar injection of quality with Cannes winner Fallen Leaves and Oscar nominee Women Talking, although most of my list of interest there are more reminders of unwatched discs: All the President’s Men, Don’t Look Now, and Spellbound for just three I’ve never seen; plus plenty to rewatch, like my 4K copies of the Back to the Future trilogy, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, The Searchers, and The Wicker Man. Heck, even MUBI — who seem to primarily deal in films I’ve not even heard of — reminded me I own Irreversible and Peeping Tom.

Okay, enough about discs I already own that I haven’t watched — what about all the new stuff I’ve bought to add to that never-ending kevyip? After receiving a large amount of praise and success at the box office earlier this year, and then seeing plenty of love for the quality of its 4K disc release online, of course I immediately blind-bought Sinners — it’s got variable IMAX aspect ratio, I was never not likely to miss it! That’s the only shiny new film on my list this month, although there were a good few back catalogue 4Ks: the latest in Hammer’s lavish collector’s edition range, Quatermass 2 (sadly, it sounds like rights issues mean we won’t be getting a matching version of Quatermass and the Pit anytime soon); a similarly extravagant reissue of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran; and, just arrived, a ludicrously chunky box set for a film previously relegated to the status of “special feature”, Apocalypse Now making-of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Yes, I bought that, despite already owning in two copies in my two copies of Apocalypse Now. It wasn’t just for the 4K restoration: it also comes with a bunch of special features, and a physical copy of Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes book Notes, which I don’t already own. Whether that package was worth the asking price, I’m not sure, but I still paid it, so…

More UHD discs: from 88 Films, Lucio Fulci’s giallo Murder Rock (aka Murderock, aka Murder-Rock: Dancing Death), along with a regular 1080p reissue of vampire giallo Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye; from Arrow’s recent sale, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Sam Raimi’s The Gift; and I imported a pile of Deaf Crocodile animation releases, led by “German adult animated psychological horror mystery” but starring cats (yes, really) Felidae and French post-apocalyptic adventure Gwen and the Book of Sand; plus, in good ol’ 1080p, Hungarian epic The Tragedy of Man and the sci-fi-focused Treasures of Soviet Animation Vol. 1 (apparently there are at least six volumes of that coming. I’m going to end up getting them all, aren’t I?)

In terms of home-grown boutique labels, I am actually trying to cut back a bit (a bit), so there was just one title from Eureka this time out: German-made Western The Sons of Great Bear. Immediately belying the idea I’m in any way cutting back, Radiance dominated the month with a selection of both new releases — The Beast to Die (which has an all-timer cover, as well as sounding like a good film) and World Noir Vol. 3 (I ought to make a start on those sets… but then, that’s true of so many box set series I own) — and a pile of pickups from their sale: Dogra Magra, Mississippi Mermaid, A Quiet Place in the Country, The Story of Adele H., Tchao Pantin, and What Happened Was….

What happened was… I spent way too much on discs again. Maybe one day I’ll stop doing that. But not this month. (Not next month either, as we shall see in 31 days’ time.)

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.

The award for “film that almost tempted me to the cinema” this month goes to F1 — or F1: The Movie, as it may or may not be known now (websites seem to keep changing their mind). I don’t expect it to be a Great Film, but I figure it probably benefits from being seen big ‘n’ loud. Maybe I’ll still go, who knows, but with July’s films already bearing down on us (the new Jurassic World is out already, and Superman is imminent) the “big” part of “big ‘n’ loud” already has its days numbered.

Close second goes to another film with a maybe-maybe-not title change, John Wick spinoff Ballerina, aka From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. I mean, seriously. Meanwhile, June’s major release that sounds like it has the most actual quality was 28 Years Later, but I never bother to see horror at the cinema, so that was never going to be a goer. Also released: live-action remake How to Train Your Dragon, which sounds as pointless as expected; horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, which generated headlines by apparently not being a horror movie at all, more action-sci-fi, which conversely has made me more interested in watching it; and the latest Pixar, Elio, on which the word of mouth has been muted. I’ve got plenty of other Pixar films still to catch up on, so that just joins the list.

I guess summer movie season still exists, because the streamers offered almost nothing original to counterbalance those big screen spectacles. The only thing I have in my notes is Deep Cover, a Prime Video action-comedy from the director of the first two series of Ghosts, starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom, and Nick Mohammed. Given all that, I’m assuming it’s more comedy than action. Audience scores look expectedly middling. It’s the kind of thing I definitely would’ve bunged on a few years ago, but nowadays I’m not sure I have the time. Nonetheless, it goes on the list of “2025 films”, so you never know — I mean, that’s a choice of two Challenge categories it qualifies for (until August begins, anyway). If I don’t get round to it soon, I very much doubt it will be significant enough to make 2025’s “50 Unseen” list. But hey, you never know.

As some kind of a counterbalance to that, plenty of big-name theatrical releases made their subscription streaming debut this past month (I wonder if the streamers take those into consideration when plotting their originals’ release dates? Never thought of that before). As per usual, NOW led the way with a slate that included Best Picture winner Anora; sequels to previous Oscar winners in Gladiator II and Joker: Folie à Deux; LEGO-based biopic Piece by Piece; superhero trilogy-closer Venom: The Last Dance; and the remake of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Prime continued to keep the theatrical window snappy with The Accountant 2 just six weeks after its big screen bow, along with Alex Garland’s Warfare after a longer-but-still-brief 16 weeks; plus Hugh Grant-starring horror Heretic, which feels like it’s taken a more traditional time period, but I haven’t bothered to work out how long. Even Disney+ had a couple worth mentioning — “worth” being a relative term, with one being their high-profile flop live-action remake of Snow White, though the other was doc Ocean with David Attenborough, which I presume has some degree of quality control due to its titular presenter. Even MUBI got in on the act with Best Animated Feature winner Flow (also out on Blu-ray at the end of the month, but I didn’t buy it because the US edition from Criterion sounds better).

Netflix, meanwhile, just had other streamers’ dregs: Barbarian, which used to be on Disney+ a while back; The Equalizer 3, fresh from NOW; Infinite and My Spy, which were both Amazon Originals during the pandemic, if I remember rightly; and the recent Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which of course used to be on iPlayer here in the UK. Of greater interest, to me at least, were sequel The Wrath of Becky (though I’ve not seen the first, which is streaming somewhere else, so maybe I won’t care to see the sequel, who knows), and The Purge: Election Year and The First Purge — they don’t have any of the other Purge films, but those are the next two I need to watch, so it’s fine by me.

The other fairly-recent catalogue title of note was Past Lives, which has bounced around a bit already but is now on iPlayer (which means I can download it and let it just sit on my hard drive forever alongside the likes of I, Tonya and Licorice Pizza and Selma). Amongst the dozens of other additions, not much provoked a significant “I really should’ve watched that by now” from me. Maybe A Cure for Wellness on Prime, just because I think director Gore Verbinski’s work is usually worth a look. And I remember Personal Shopper (also Prime) was meant to be good.

More conscious-pricking, as usual, were all the films I also own on disc and haven’t (re)watched yet, like Peter Jackson’s King Kong (I’m not sure I’ve seen that since the cinema, despite owning the extended cut on both DVD and Blu-ray), or Stargate (which I’ve owned with the intention of rewatching for literally decades), or Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (which, of course, I bought in Hammer’s recent lavish 4K edition), or Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (a general reminder that I own tonnes of 3D stuff I should get to before my TV dies or something), or Ridley Scott’s Legend (of which I bothered to import Arrow’s US-only release), or, heck, Se7en’s come around again, for the umpteenth time since I bought the 4K release. (All of those are streaming on Prime, by-the-way, who are the kings of making me think “should I have bothered to buy that or would waiting for it on streaming have sufficed?”)

Nonetheless, my addiction to buying more Blu-rays continues unabated. Plenty of upgrades to 4K this month, including a pair of early-’90s Jackie Chan outings from 88 Films, Crime Story and Armour of God II: Operation Condor; should-be-classic Dark City from Arrow; Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (a rare Steelbook buy because the regular edition’s cover was so fugly); the big box edition of The Nice Guys from Second Sight; and a selection of US imports (a bulk order, as always) including Darkman, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and the Rocky box set (I might not have bothered, but two new cuts swayed me). Plus another unwieldy big box from Hammer of The Quatermass Xperiment (not an upgrade, because I’ve never owned it before — how refreshing), and one actual new film on 4K, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17.

The aforementioned US order also included my favourite first-time watch of last year, Bottoms; a rare 3D purchase (not because I don’t choose to buy them, but because they don’t release many nowadays) of ’50s noir The Glass Web; and more noir courtesy of Warner Archive in Mystery Street and Side Street, plus 1921 silent The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (which, I confess, I mainly bought to support the idea of Warner Archive releasing silent movies). Despite that trio, the most prominent label of the month has to be Eureka, with a stylistically wide spread of titles that included 1950s German fantasy Heart of Stone, wartime drama Hong Kong 1941, a double-bill of martial arts action under the surtitle Exact Revenge, and a sextet of ’60s crime thrillers in their Terror in the Fog: The Wallace Krimi at CCC box set.

Other labels only contributed a title or two, although there’s a distinct eastern throughline: fantasy-flavoured action from Arrow in The Invisible Swordsman; samurai horror from Radiance with The Tale of Oiwa’s Ghost; and John Woo’s original cut of Heroes Shed No Tears, titled Sunset Warriors, from 88 Films. Breaking the mould, Curzon put out one of the key titles not included in their comprehensive Lars von Trier box set in 2023, Palme d’Or winner Dancer in the Dark. I own that Von Trier set too, so I really ought to dig into his back catalogue more. But then, I’ve got a lot of back catalogue stuff I really ought to dig into.

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.

As is so often the case, Disney were the dominant box office force this month, bookending May with a pair of discussion-worthy films. At the start, apparently Marvel have finally made a good movie again with Thunderbolts* (aka The New Avengers). I’ve just got seven other MCU films to catch up on before I get there (we’ll just gloss over the nine seasons of TV (plus two specials) that I also haven’t seen). At the end of the month, their latest live-action remake, Lilo & Stitch — from what I’ve seen, not a critical success at all, but certainly a moneymaking one. I guess they won’t be stopping these do-overs anytime soon, then.

Other noteworthy big screen releases in May included (but were not necessarily limited to) a horror franchise return in Final Destination: Bloodlines (the franchise has a history of inconsistent quality (heck, what horror franchise doesn’t?), but I’m sure I’ll watch it eventually); a new Wes Anderson, The Phoenician Scheme (like the MCU, I’m a few behind with Anderson now); and another belated franchise continuation, Karate Kid: Legends (I intend to finish Cobra Kai before I watch this, so I won’t be catching it on the big screen, but hopefully by the time it hits streaming I’ll be ready for it).

We’re clearly heading into summer blockbuster season (does that even exist anymore, with studios releasing big-budget tentpoles basically year-round now?), and streaming was keen to get in on the game with Guy Ritchie’s latest heading direct to Apple TV+. Fountain of Youth looks like National Treasure with the serial numbers filed off, and I read one review which argued it was beat-for-beat Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade but tweaked enough at every stage to avoid plagiarism. Not ringing endorsements, then, but as it’s a genre of movie I mostly enjoy, it might make for easygoing entertainment one evening.

Other original premieres included Cleaner on Sky Cinema / NOW, an actioner directed by Martin Campbell, which apparently continues his streak of only doing mediocre work on films that don’t star James Bond or Zorro. Oh well. In a similar vein, they had another actioner from a once-promising ’90s action director — Simon “Con Air” West — that looks like it’s gone direct to streaming for a reason: Christoph Waltz hitman comedy Old Guy. Going straight to Prime Video was Paul Feig sequel Another Simple Favour (like the original, it challenges whether you’re committed to the sanctity of English spelling or tempting search engines with the American original). As for Netflix, they also continue the franchise game with Fear Street: Prom Queen, which I think is the fourth one, but more interesting was Lost in Starlight. All I could tell you about it is it’s a sci-fi animation, but hey, that’s better than “fourth (I think) instalment in a horror franchise I’ve never watched”.

Turning to theatrical releases making their subscription streaming debuts, I don’t think Netflix had anything to offer this month. Sky Cinema lead the way, as usual, with Oscar nominee The Wild Robot and Tim Burton legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Back when the latter hit cinemas, I wrote that “I’ve never been particularly fond of Beetlejuice… so I certainly wasn’t rushing out to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the cinema, though I’ll inevitably catch it once it’s streaming somewhere.” Well, now it’s on NOW. I still haven’t rushed to see it (it’s been on there over a fortnight already), but I do intend to at some point. Amazon offered up the latest Jason Statham vehicle, A Working Man, while Disney+ stayed relatively up-to-date with the MCU by adding Captain America: Brave New World — thought I’ll wait until I can source a 3D copy before properly adding it to my aforementioned MCU catch up list.

Digging into back catalogue expansions, I’d love to say Netflix had more to offer, but I’m not sure the likes of Dracula Untold and Gran Turismo are anything to celebrate. They did add Machete Kills, which I have a vague intention to see (it’s 12 years old now and I haven’t seen it yet, which shows you how invested I am), but at this point I’m really keeping my Netflix sub so I can finish catching up on Cobra Kai. Also because I still haven’t watched Paddington in Peru. Prime had a typically lengthy list of kinda-random new stuff — particularly catching my eye were Luc Besson’s The Big Blue, Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, and fantasy romance classic Ghost (yeah, I’ve never seen Ghost); plus a bunch of reminders for stuff I’ve bought with intent to rewatch but haven’t yet: A Boy and His Dog, A Few Good Men, Natural Born Killers, Ronin, Training Day… I could go on, but instead I’ll switch service for more of the same, as iPlayer also jabbed me about the original Halloween, Highlander, La La Land in 4K, and Toy Story 4 in 3D; plus one I’ve bought and never seen, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future — but let’s not venture too far down that road, or it’ll be another long list. Instead, let’s close out streaming with something more obscure on MUBI (of course): Only the River Flows. All I know about it is what they had to say, but something described as a “moody neo-noir… a pungently atmospheric serial-killer procedural” sounds right up my street.

But, inevitably, we must flip back to “stuff I bought on disc and didn’t watch”, because there was plenty of that, as ever. Leading the pack in May were 4K upgrades for some absolute classics: from Arrow, the first two entries in Sergio Leone’s trilogy of Spaghetti Westerns, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More (I have The Good, the Bad and the Ugly preordered, of course), plus Akira Kurosawa’s reimagining of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, courtesy of the BFI. Also in 4K, I imported a trio of hefty limited editions by Umbrella from Australia: Tarsem Singh’s The Fall (considering MUBI are responsible for the 4K restoration, I presume they’ll do a disc here at some point, but no sign of it yet); Richard Stanley’s debut, horror sci-fi Hardware; and (not in 4K) medieval folk horror Black Death, which I have wanted to revisit for a while after I rather enjoyed it more years ago than I care to think about.

No mainstream releases to report this month (I intend to pick up Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, but haven’t yet), but all the usual boutique labels feature, albeit in smaller quantities than sometimes. Leading the pack by volume is Eureka, thanks to four-film Masters of Cinema box set Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA, featuring a quartet of sci-fi flicks from mid-20th-century East Germany; plus their latest Shaw Brothers release, The Bells of Death, which I hope lives up to its billing as “a standout wuxia film heavily influenced by both the longstanding Japanese samurai tradition and the emergent Spaghetti Western”. Next we find 88 Films with another giallo, Nine Guests for a Crime, and a pair of Japanese superhero comedies from insanely prolific director Takashi Miike, Zebraman and Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City. Finally, just one from Radiance this month: Japanese prison break thriller The Rapacious Jailbreaker; and one from their partner label, Raro Video: Shoot First, Die Later, a poliziottesco — and as I still need to watch seven of those for this year’s Genre category, it gets to immediately sit pretty high on my to-watch list. Imagine that: actually watching stuff I buy!

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.

Quite often this column seems to start on a negative note when it comes to new theatrical releases, usually because something has underperformed. Not so this month, with A Minecraft Movie being a box office juggernaut at the start of the month, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners a huge hit towards the end, too. Is the cinema “back”? Or are these just fortunate exceptions? Or maybe they prove that, if you make the right stuff, people will go out to see it. Working out what “the right stuff” is has always been Hollywood’s game, of course; I think they just became so obsessed with shared universes and familiar franchises in the wake of the success of the MCU and The Force Awakens that they forgot they could do anything else if — or, as it’s turned out, when — the general audience began to finally turn their back on ‘reliable’ cash cows.

Also on the big screen this past month, unexpected sequel The Accountant 2 (the first one was nine years ago and it’s not like people have been clamouring for a followup, have they?); Rami Malek-starring spy thriller The Amateur; fantasy comedy Death of a Unicorn; a new thriller from the director of Happy Death Day (which I’m rather fond of), Drop; another Alex Garland war movie, this time shorn of the ‘alternate history’ element, simply titled Warfare; and a handful of other things with varying degrees of impact that aren’t as on my personal radar.

The most noteworthy streaming premiere this month was the long-delayed new actioner from Gareth “The Raid” Evans… but I actually watched that (miracles do happen), so instead I guess the next-biggest was Amazon Prime’s actioner G20, which looks like it should star Gerard Butler but doesn’t. He also turned up on Prime this month though, in direct-to-streaming sequel Den of Thieves: Pantera, in case you missed him. That said, the film that most excited me on Prime this month was Superboys of Malegaon, which I also wrote about when it had a limited theatrical release in February. “If it so excited you, why didn’t you watch it?” A reasonable question. It only arrived near the end of the month, so it’s a top contender to be watched as May’s Failure.

There were plenty of other big-name and/or acclaimed theatrical titles also making their streaming debuts this month. Sticking with Prime, BAFTA Best Picture winner Conclave also dropped right at the end of the month, plus they offered awards also-ran September 5. Netflix had arguably the most populist newcomer with Paddington in Peru (I was surprised it was streaming “already”, then realised just how far through 2025 we are already), along with less well-known but well-regarded How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. NOW was no shirk either, with Despicable Me 4, Twisters, Transformers One, and M Night Shyamalan’s Trap. Even Disney+ and MUBI got in on the game, with the former dropping Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, also right at the end of the month, and the latter offering Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl.

Recent-ish releases that also grabbed attention by moving around exactly where they were streaming included Anatomy of a Fall, Asteroid City, Black Adam, Don’t Worry Darling, Expend4bles, and Saw X (all now on Netflix), and… oh, I think that’s it. Does everything gravitate towards Netflix in the end? I’m sure they’d like you to think it does. My list of “stuff I could mention in this column” is far longer for Prime every month, I’ll tell you that. Amazon’s offering certainly includes more variety, with a greater number of older and more obscure titles. I mean, I’d never expect to find well-regarded poliziotteschi Illustrious Corpses or Neil “brother of Sean” Connery-starring James Bond spoof Operation Kid Brother on Netflix, yet they’re both on Prime now. Heck, even something like American Graffiti would be a surprise — sure, it’s directed by George Lucas, but it’s old! Yuck! Plus, they’ve also recently added a bunch of stuff that’s been released on disc by Radiance — ones I spied (because I own them, of course) included Big Time Gambling Boss, Messiah of Evil, We Still Kill the Old Way, and Yakuza Graveyard.

The list of other back catalogue stuff I could mention is, as ever, long. For a little insight, even six paragraphs into the column, my list of still-unmentioned streaming additions is 123 films long. Exactly half of those are reminders of stuff I own on disc that I either haven’t watched or would like to revisit. (Obviously exactly half would be 61.5, but you can’t have 0.5 films, so it rounds to 62, which is exactly how many there are. Ha-ha!) Any of particular note? Well, a handful of titles I need to watch for Blindspot that left streaming earlier in the year are now back — Midsommar and The Notebook on Prime; The Graduate on iPlayer — but I already, uh, acquired other copies, so it doesn’t really matter. Reminders for films I’ve upgraded to 4K on disc but still haven’t rewatched were, as ever, abundant, with headliners including Schindler’s List on Netflix; The Departed, Heat, and The Lost Boys on Prime; Vanilla Sky and The Warriors on NOW; The Abyss on Disney+; and the first four Indiana Joneses pulling a double whammy by turning up on both Netflix and NOW.

There were also additions to almost every streamer that remind me how poorly I’ve done with reviews over the last few years — i.e. stuff I’ve already seen but haven’t written up, like Fast X on Netflix, Judgment at Nuremberg on Prime, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm on NOW, and Dumbo (the live-action one) on iPlayer. They’re not failures in the sense this column means, because I’m not imminently intending to watch them again (heck, half of them I don’t ever intend to watch again), but they’re certainly failures of a different kind.

And if we’re talking about failures on multiple levels, well, what are my disc purchases but failures of self-control? Especially considering how few of them I actually watch. But let’s dodge that existential crisis (as I do every month) by just diving into a list of what I’ve bought recently. Brand-new films are limited to Nosferatu on 4K, but other 4K new releases included ’80s sci-fi actioner Trancers from 101 Films, ’90s action thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight from Arrow, and giallo Short Night of Glass Dolls from 88 Films, who also released Jackie Chan’s Miracles. Those latter two labels feature prominently in a bunch of sale pickups this month, too: from Arrow, vampire horror The Addiction, horror thriller Mute Witness, and horror sequel three-pack Psycho: The Story Continues, plus another horror sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic, on regular Blu-ray; and from 88, giallo Eyeball and Lovecraftian horror From Beyond, That’s a whole lot of horror, especially considering I’d never say it’s a favourite genre. Possibly that’s why I have so much to catch up on. Other 4K titles I’ve waited to appear in sales included Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, and James Cameron’s The Terminator (I avoided it initially because of Cameron’s love for AI upscaling, but apparently it’s not that bad here).

In terms of non-4K releases, 88 feature heavily again, though here with Japanese and Hong Kong movies of various stripes: Kinji Fukasaku’s Jakoman & Tetsu, Shaw Brothers’ Lady with a Sword, and gangster drama Yakuza Wives. More recently from Japan is fantasy comedy A Samurai in Time, the first-ever independent film to win Best Picture at the Japanese Academy Awards. Also “recent” in the sense of “from this century”, the BFI release of Takeshi Kitano’s Brother. A few more titles in the same general milieu came from Eureka, with ’90s Hong Kong actioner The Adventurers and a pair from director Chang Cheh, The Magnificent Trio and Magnificent Wanderers. Eureka also released a box set of six Dr Mabuse films from the ’60s in their Mabuse Lives! box set, which also prompted me to finally pick up their 2012 Blu-ray of Fritz Lang’s classic Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse.

I held off on that last one because I own it on DVD as part of Eureka’s nicely-presented Lang/Mabuse set, and somehow 13 years has passed. 13 years! Gives you some perspective on how long Blu-ray has been around now, and how much the industry fucked up driving a transition away from DVD. All those people who’ve proudly bought 4K TVs and probably just watch DVDs and low-tier-subscription low-quality streaming on them, thinking they’re getting a UHD experience… Well, that’s not my problem!