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July’s Failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 20th Monthly Review of July 2026

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At one point this month, I really thought I was going to, finally, for the first time since November last year, hit my ten first-time watches minimum goal. And then life and stuff happened again and I didn’t.

The average number of Challenge-qualifying films I need to watch each month for the rest of the year now sits at 12.4. The average number I’ve watched each month so far this year is 5.4. Not promising… but 12.4 is not beyond the realms of what I’ve managed in the past… although the last time I had a month above 12 was December 2024, and the last five-month stretch that averaged above 12.4 was in 2021…

But you never know.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#31 Wuthering Heights (2026) — New Film #3
#32 Enola Holmes 3 (2026) — New Film #4
#33 Lawless (2012) — Wildcard #6
#34 The Sheep Detectives (2026) — New Film #5
#35 Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) — Failure #7
#36 Joyride (2022) — Wildcard #7
#37 The Odyssey (2026) — New Film #6
#38 Project Hail Mary (2026) — New Film #7


  • I watched eight feature films I’d never seen before in July.
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge.
  • Five of them were films that had their UK release this year, taking my New Films category from “barely started” to “up-to-date” in one fell swoop.
  • Neither Blindspot nor WDYMYHS were progressed this month, unfortunately.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched Bodies Bodies Bodies and The Sheep Detectives.



The 134th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Sometimes I feel like so much of what I watch these days is middling — as I’ve discussed before, I don’t know if I’ve just become a harsher critic as I’ve got older (I guess gaining experience will do that to you — fewer things feel unique) or if the quality of films I’m choosing to watch has declined — but every now and then something does come along and blows me away, and this month it was Project Hail Mary.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Certified (inter)national treasure Olivia Colman shows off / labours under (deleted as applicable; I have no idea if it was good or not) an Irish accent throughout dramedy Joyride, which is… kinda fine? Some of it was funny, which rubbed a little awkwardly against when it got a bit Serious.


I’m gonna call it now: if August is the month that brings about a turnaround in my film viewing fortunes, I will be very surprised. I’m not going to do a Werner Herzog and commit to eating a shoe or something, but I’m pretty damn certain that in a month’s time I’ll be writing about a new high average that I need to hit for the rest of the year. In fact, it might finally reach the point of feeling insurmountable. We’ll see in 31 days.

June’s Failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right?

The 20th Monthly Review of June 2026

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And we’re halfway through the year! But my Challenge? That’s not even a third completed…

To be honest, without wanting to go into too much detail, this year has been a struggle on a personal level, so it’s no wonder my film viewing has slipped so drastically. My current plan is to continue just picking away at it and I’ll see what happens. I’m not going to outright abandon it, but I’m not going to stress about it too much either, because I have other things to do that about.

In that spirit, onwards with the usual bits and pieces…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#27 Is This Thing On? (2025) — New Film #2
#28 The Choral (2025) — Wildcard #5
#29 Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025) — Failure #6
#30 The Prince of Egypt (1998) — Blindspot #4


  • I watched four feature films I’d never seen before in June.
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, but no rewatches.
  • That’s more-or-less on-brand for 2026: my monthly average thus far has been just 5.0, when it needs to be 8.3 to reach 100 on schedule.
  • It has left me 19 films behind target, though. Yes, I should be at #49 by the end of June — you can thank the uncommon shortness of February for slightly unbalancing that target.
  • This month’s Blindspot film was Disney-esque Dreamworks musical animation The Prince of Egypt.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS film… wasn’t.
  • From last month’s “failures” I only watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.



The 133rd Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Nothing I really loved this month, to be honest. I guess Is This Thing On? was the one with the most high-quality moments, even if overall it felt too long-winded and could’ve done with being tighter.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
I don’t remember The Prince of Egypt making much of a splash back when it came out (almost 30 years ago!), but it seems to have amassed a strong reputation since. Personally, I didn’t much care for it and don’t really understand its renaissance, but there you go.


Keep on keeping on.

May’s Failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 20th Monthly Review of May 2026

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Here’s the latest update on the slowly-unfolding disaster that is my 2026 Challenge…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#22 Locker Sixty-Nine (1962) — Series Progression #4
#23 Jaws 3-D (1983) — Genre #2
#24 The Blade (1995) — Failure #5
#25 The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) — Blindspot #3
#26 Puss in Boots 3D (2011) — 50 Unseen #3


  • I watched five feature films I’d never seen before in May.
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge.
  • Unfortunately, that’s a slip back from last month‘s nine. May started well, but life got in the way later on and I couldn’t capitalise on that good start.
  • It also means I’ve slipped further behind my target pace: I was five films behind by the end of January, nine by the end of February, and 12 by the end of March, which I at least held steady in April. I’m now 15 films behind.
  • Every ‘Series Progression’ film so far in 2026 has been an Edgar Wallace Mystery, which was not the plan! Though it was, perhaps, inevitable that this would happen someday. I’ve been watching them since April 2023 and still have almost 30 to go, so it may well continue.
  • This month’s Blindspot film was Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. It was supposed to be part of WDYMYHS 2019, but I didn’t complete my list that year — it’s only taken me another seven years to rectify that.
  • I had a plan in mind for this month’s WDYMYHS film(s), but didn’t manage to execute it and ended up not watching any.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched only The Blade.



The 132nd Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Two 3D movies this month! On the positive end of the spectrum, one where the typical swooping camerawork of CG animation really helps the depth and dimensionality to sing. I love a good swashbuckler and Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots definitely fits the bill.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
After finding Jaws 2 surprisingly enjoyable despite its reputation, I was somewhat looking forward to Jaws 3-D — I wasn’t foolish enough to expect a masterpiece, but maybe it would be fun, especially in 3D? Oh, no. No, no, no. It’s a terrible movie with mostly unremarkable 3D. I’ll still watch Jaws: The Revenge someday to be completist, but I hope it goes even further and actually reaches “so bad it’s good” territory.


As 2026 nudges towards its halfway point, I’ll once again reassess if there’s any hope of turning around my Challenge for this year.

Before that, this month’s “failures” column is likely to be another delayed one, because I’ve got a busy week and I’m not sure I’ll even have a chance to consider writing it before Thursday.

April’s Failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 20th Monthly Review of April 2026

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We’re one-third of the way through 2026, but my film viewing hasn’t even reached the one-quarter mark of my Challenge. Oh dear.

Still, April was the strongest month of the year so far, and the goal isn’t out of reach yet. More about the exact numbers behind those observations in my viewing notes; first, the films I did watch:



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#13 Breakout (1959) — Series Progression #3
#14 Ordeal by Innocence (1984) — Wildcard #2
#15 One Battle After Another (2025) — Failure #4
#16 Nonnas (2025) — Wildcard #3
#17 3-D Rarities (2015) — Genre #1
#18 Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) — Blindspot #2
#19 Conclave (2024) — 50 Unseen #2
#20 Hope Gap (2019) — Wildcard #4
#21 A Wednesday (2008) — WDYMYHS #2


  • I watched nine feature films I’d never seen before in April.
  • That makes this the best month of 2026 to date by some margin, although it still falls short of my ten-film target.
  • All nine counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, but no rewatches this month.
  • The target for the end of April is #33, so I’m still 12 films behind.
  • With 79 films to go in the next eight months, that’s a required average of 9.88 Challenge films per month — slightly up from 9.78 after March. Still some work to be done to stand a chance of catching up, then.
  • 3-D Rarities is my first Genre film for 2026, making that the last category to get underway.
  • This month’s Blindspot film was French New Wave drama Hiroshima Mon Amour.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS film was Indian antiterrorism thriller A Wednesday.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched only One Battle After Another.



The 131st Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
It was the most recent Best Picture winner and a Paul Thomas Anderson film — two things that some people (not necessarily the same people) would take as an unimpeachable mark of quality, but which are very much “wait and see” indicators for me. But as it turns out, they were right, and I thought One Battle After Another was fantastic.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
I imagine that, back when it was released in 2008, A Wednesday felt timely and relevant. Nowadays, it’s dated both stylistically (its camerawork and editing is heavily indebted to other early-21st-century works in the genre) and politically (its chosen antiterrorism angle feels ickily far right in light of the present-day landscape).


I’ve got a very busy May coming up — I wouldn’t be surprised if progress gets knocked back again. And I can state with a high degree of confidence that, if I’m ever going to turn things around and re-start publishing reviews, it won’t happen next month.

March’s Failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 20th Monthly Review of March 2026

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

Reader, they did not.

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

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



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

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


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



The 130th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

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

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


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

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