Tag Archives: Disney Plus

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.

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.

Pick your poison for what was the most noteworthy theatrical release in March: Bong Joon-ho’s first film since the all-conquering Parasite, Mickey 17; or Disney’s latest live-action remake and PR mess, Snow White. I know which I’ll be watching first when they make their way to disc and/or streaming. Elsewise, it was quite a strong month for animation, with Oscar winner Flow finally making it to UK screens, alongside the highest grossing animated movie of all time (thanks China), Ne Zha 2, and the latest entry in the long-running Gundam anime franchise, this time pairing up with the creatives behind Neon Genesis Evangelion for the barely-pronounceable Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX: The Beginning, released theatrically ahead of its TV series (on Prime Video worldwide from next week. I presume the movie, or an episodic version of it, will form part of that offering). Also occupying screen space were Steven Soderbergh’s second film this year already, spy thriller Black Bag, and a new Jason Statham actioner directed by David “Suicide Squad” Ayer, A Working Man, plus other films I know even less about but had big names in them or just enough of a marketing push that they entered my consciousness, like Last Breath, Opus, The Alto Knights, Novocaine, and The Woman in the Yard. I look forward to next hearing of them when they’re on free/subscription streaming and I automatically add them to my never-ending watchlist.

Talking of streaming, Netflix had an original this month that managed to attract chatter on a theatrical level — albeit for all the wrong reasons, because The Electric State is supposedly slop of the lowest order. I’ll say this for it: it prompted me to buy the book it’s based on, which I hear is excellent. Conversely, attracting no attention whatsoever (as far as I saw) was Prime Video Original Holland, which appears to be some kind of mystery thriller starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, and Gael García Bernal. That interests me on the surface, but dropping it with no fanfare hardly instills confidence. Similar could be said for O’Dessa on Disney+ — yes, Disney+ has some original feature-length content to report this month! It’s a rock musical of some sort, apparently, starring Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink, who the industry seems to be desperately trying to make happen and I have no idea if it’s working or not (nothing she’s led seems to have broken out, but who knows what’s going on with Young People on the TikToks and whatnot).

Otherwise it was business as usual, in the sense that theatrically-released films of various sizes made their subscription streaming debuts. Disney+ de facto leads the way with big-hit animated sequel Moana 2 and unwanted live-action sequel Mufasa: The Lion King. Prime Video was on a slightly smaller scale with Brit flick The Critic and second Hellboy reboot Hellboy: The Crooked Man, though I bet I watch at least one of those before I watch either of those Disney offerings. The best Netflix could muster was Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which may or may not have already been on NOW, I can’t remember, thus showing how much I care for that franchise at this point. And as for NOW, their slate included litigation-provoking adaptation It Ends With Us, one-quarter of an epic Western in Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (has Chapter 2 come out yet? I forget), and AI horror Afraid (aka AfrAId, geddit?)

Back catalogue additions that particularly caught my eye included two titles on Prime I’d never heard of before: The Black Watch, aka King of the Khyber Rifles, a 1929 John Ford movie co-starring Mrs Thin Man, Myrna Loy, which doesn’t have a great score on IMDb but, hey, what do they know; and Knight Chills, a TTRPG-related slasher movie, which looks low-rent but perhaps fun. Hey, it can’t be worse than Mazes and Monsters… probably. iPlayer filled a gap by offering the first Harry Palmer sequel, Funeral in Berlin. The others are on Prime, so now I can watch them all, for good or ill (I figure there’s a reason most people have only heard of The Ipcress File). MUBI are encouraging me to give the work of Jacques Tati another go by adding a bunch of his films. I saw M. Hulot’s Holiday and Playtime at uni (and reviewed the latter) and didn’t care for either, but my taste has broadened since then, so who knows now?

As ever, I could spend many paragraphs rattling through all the other streaming additions, but (as has become my habit recently) let’s focus on ones I already own on disc. For example, Se7en cropped up on Netflix, thus giving me an excuse to mention it for the third month in a row and hopefully push me to watch the 4K disc I bought. It could be worse: How the West Was Won is on iPlayer, and that was one of the first Blu-rays I bought, so it’s been sat on my shelf for 15 or so years. Could be worse: I own Orson Welles’s Confidential Report on Criterion DVD, and look, there it is in HD on Prime. At the other end of the scale, a recent ‘mistake’: I imported the US Blu-ray of The Last Voyage of the Demeter because there was no sign of a UK release, then didn’t rush to watch it and now there’s been a UK release, a 4K release, and it’s streaming ‘free’, and in 4K to boot. Dammit.

I could go on in this vein, but let’s instead to transition to future stars of my “regrets” section: all the new stuff I’ve bought on disc! Lots of 4K titles this week, from brand-new releases like Gladiator II, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and Megalopolis, to lavish new editions of older titles, like a pair of David Cronenbergs from Second Sight, The Brood (which I’ve never seen) and Scanners (which I have and rather loved); a pair of Akira Kurosawas from the BFI, Yojimbo and Sanjuro (both great, though most praise tends to be aimed at the first whereas I have a soft spot for the second); the first in Hammer’s attempt to highlight some of their lesser-known titles, Four Sided Triangle; and, though I am usually loathe to pay full price for a Criterion, I wanted to support them releasing films like Godzilla vs. Biollante.

(If you’ll indulge an aside into some semi-informed analysis: Godzilla vs. Biollante strikes me as a telling release, in that Criterion putting it out by itself at this point suggests there’s no chance of the hoped-for Heisei Era set coming as a companion / followup to the Showa Era one they released as #1000 back in 2019. Sure, they released the original Godzilla as a standalone title before the Showa set, but that’s a different kettle of fish: the original will interest some people who don’t care for the franchise as a whole, whereas Biollante is nothing so iconic. The fact it’s only the second Heisei film leaves me hopeful the ones that followed will also get the Criterion treatment; at least the next two would be nice, as their previous double-bill Blu-ray release is currently $195+. Or maybe I’m looking at it all wrong — maybe they’ve got access to all these films in 4K and think a 4K box set would be prohibitive. But I think the fact they haven’t started with the era’s first film, The Return of Godzilla (aka Godzilla 1984), doesn’t bode well for that presumption. As always, time will tell.)

Also, I begrudgingly bought the Steelbook release of Panic Room. I’m not a huge fan of Steelbooks (unless they’re doing something clever or have exceptionally nice art, which they so rarely do), especially as nowadays it just seems to be an excuse to gouge an extra £10+ from the customer; but you can no longer guarantee that the Steelbook won’t be the only 4K release of a title (look at all those Disney+ series, and I guess that model works because Warner recently copied it for The Penguin), and, like many people, I’ve been waiting on Panic Room in HD (never mind 4K) for what feels like forever, so I didn’t want to miss out. It’s a particularly ugly Steelbook too, so I can’t even console myself with “at least it looks pretty”. If they do put out a regular edition soon, I’ll be miffed; but while there’s no sign of one, hey, at least I finally own it in HD.

Slipping down to regular ol’ 1080p Blu-ray, the boutique labels continue to dominate my spending. This month’s inevitable Radiance haul included new releases Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau (containing Police Python 357, Série noire, and Choice of Arms); French sci-fi romance Je T’aime, Je T’aime; a pickup from a previous wave, Italian newspaper-based thriller Slap the Monster on Page One; and, from their partner label Raro Video, poliziotteschi Rulers of the City. How am I meant to resist when they’re putting out stuff in some of my pet favourite subgenres? The same goes for Eureka releasing a double-bill of Venom Mob films, The Daredevils and Ode to Gallantry. I’m not even a fan of the Venom Mob films I have seen, but I see something classic from Shaw Brothers Studio and I struggle to resist. Maybe these will be the ones where I understand what makes the group so popular.

Okay, so, yeah, I should probably cut back on purchases like that. Will I ever learn? Well, news came at the end of the month that may help: HMV have ended their 20% “first order” discount, which has long been usable on as many orders as you like if you knew what you were doing. The scheme had been running for a couple of years, meaning big purchasers racked up hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of savings. I dread to think exactly how much I saved (because it would mean I spent four times more), but it was a significant factor in my purchasing decisions. Now, I guess I’ll end up spending about the same but get less for it, and spread my purchases around other stores too. We can’t exactly complain (we got far more out of it than we were ever meant to), but I can’t help but think that if HMV are expecting their gross sales to increase by 25%, they’ve got a nasty surprise coming.

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.

It’s that slightly-odd tail-end of summer time in cinemas at the moment (though, does the summer blockbuster season really exist anymore? Ever since Marvel started putting out major movies in the spring, and we’ve had major winter releases for even longer (at least since the 2001 double whammy of the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films), it feels like the idea of the year’s biggest movies being routinely limited to the summer months has evaporated. Regardless, August’s lot have that post-summer feel of movies aimed at a wide audience but that aren’t surefire major hits. We’re talking the latest M Night Shyamalan thriller, Trap; a new attempt to fresh the Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus; a reboot of The Crow; horrors Cuckoo and Afraid; psychological thriller Blink Twice; and apparently there was a new movie from Neil Marshall, Duchess, and video game adaptation Borderlands finally came out, though I don’t think I saw any actual talk about either, so they could’ve been bumped for all I know. And that’s without mentioning high-profile-ish rereleases like Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, a restored 3D version of Coraline (quite what needs restoring about such a recent film, I don’t know; maybe they just slap that label on any new rerelease now), and a 4K do-over of The Terminator (which I believe I heard James Cameron was involved with, so probably looks like shit).

The end of summer also means the streamers attempt to get back in on the action, with blockbuster-esque new releases in the form of Amazon Prime’s action-comedy from Paul Feig starring Awkwafina and John Cena, Jackpot!, and Netflix’s action-comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry, The Union. Indeed, Wahlberg was pulling double duty for streamers this month, also appearing on Prime in true-story sports/dog movie Arthur the King. Even Apple TV+ got in on the action, tapping Matt Damon and Casey Affleck to star in director Doug Liman’s latest, action-comedy The Instigators. I guess the algorithm says people like action-comedies with stars in… There was also John Woo’s modern remake of his own action classic The Killer on Peacock in the US, but there’s no sign of a UK releaser or date yet. (Naturally, I’ve acquired a copy anyway.) They even got in on the “modified re-release” game, with Apple TV+ surprise dropping Ridley Scott’s Napoleon: The Director’s Cut earlier in the week, which adds 48 minutes to the already-lengthy movie. It also gives me the dilemma about which cut to watch, as I never got round to the original version. And speaking of director’s cuts, Netflix released Zack Snyder’s preferred versions of Rebel Moon Parts One and Two… or Chapters One and Two, I think they are now… with different subtitles, too. I don’t think anyone except Snyder diehards actually cared. (I appreciate this is tempting their vengeance, but I genuinely didn’t see anyone talking about those films after release day, and even on the day there was little more than an acknowledgment of their existence.)

Really, the most exciting thing from the streamers this month wasn’t any one film, but the fact NOW have finally added UHD quality. They used to lag so far behind in this — after all the others had introduced UHD, their version of HD was still only 720 — but now it seems they’ve caught up; and in one fell swoop too, because as soon as I noticed they had anything in UHD, it seemed almost everything was. So that’s nice. It makes me more inclined to actually watch stuff on there, whereas before it was a bit of a “stuff I’m not that fussed about but kinda want to see at some point”. And in terms of actual new additions, they had exciting recent releases like, er, Madame Web. Yeah. Of more interest, a couple of films I’d not heard of but I saw recommended in Radio Times: Irish noir thriller Barber and sci-fi romantic drama If You Were the Last. Also musical biopic All That Jazz, which crops up on “greatest films of all time” lists but never seems to be streaming anywhere.

On the more frustrating end of new-to-streaming titles, Disney+ debuted Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes almost two months before its disc release. I really want to see it, but I’m also inevitably going to buy it on physical media, so I want to wait for that… but there it is, on Disney+, tempting me. At least I don’t actually pay for Disney+ myself, so it’s a bit easier to resist. But I guess this is still their strategy to try to drive streaming over physical: “yeah, sure, we’ll release it physically eventually… but you can watch it on streaming right noooow…” Also Kinds of Kindness, the Yorgos Lanthimos film that arrived surprisingly quickly after his last one; but I haven’t watched that last one yet (i.e. Oscar winner Poor Things, also on Disney+), so his latest doesn’t exactly jump to the top of my viewing list.

What else was happening on the streamers? Netflix added Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color — I’ve still not got round to the colour version, so the black-and-white alternate is hardly a top priority for me. They also brought back The Power of the Dog in the UK, after its disappearance to be on iPlayer a couple of months ago; and the Criterion 4K release made it to the UK this month too, so now we’re spoilt for choice. Definitely the kind of film I feel I should see, and maybe I’ll like, but it also it feels like it’ll be heavy-going and I’ve got to be in the right frame of mind for that kind of thing. Maybe I’m wrong, who knows. I’ll find out someday. Just to rattle off a few other attention-grabbers from across the board: on Netflix, the film that provoked so much controversy with Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar acting nomination, To Leslie; on Amazon, a superhero movie I keep forgetting even exists, DC League of Super-Pets, but I remain kinda curious every time I remember it because it’s kind of an odd concept, really; also Scent of a Woman, which briefly, seemingly out of nowhere, popped into the IMDb Top 250 the other month, thus elevating it from “a film I’m vaguely aware exists” to “a film I should maybe watch”); and, oh, just so much other stuff.

I’m not even going to begin listing the stuff I own on disc that its appearance on streaming reminded me I really should’ve got round to watching — except I am going to “begin” that, because some highlights (if you can call anything about my constant failure a “highlight”) include Shaun of the Dead (which I’ve not seen in almost 20 years); Ben Affleck’s The Town (one of those films that’s hardly a ‘major’ movie but also feels daft I’ve never got round to); Tremors (a film I thought was merely fine when I first saw it, whereas now I think I might better appreciate the B-ish charms that made it a cult favourite, so I bought the Arrow 4K back whenever that came out); and the trilogy of Piotr Szulkin sci-fi movies that I blind bought the Radiance box set of — The War of the Worlds: Next Century, O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization, and Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes — but which are now also on MUBI, along with a fourth film (Golem) that was included in the US equivalent of the set but for which a different distributor was supposedly working on a UK release (which hasn’t yet materialised, as far as I know).

That’s only scratching the surface… and, naturally, I bought even more stuff that’s destined to be a similar failure in the future. Let’s begin with another box set of Eastern European genre titles: Deaf Crocodile’s Aleksandr Ptushko Fantastika Box, which includes the fantasy epics Ilya Muromets (released in the West — and riffed over on Mystery Science Theater 3000 — as The Sword and the Dragon), Sampo (similarly released and spoofed as The Day the Earth Froze), The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and Ruslan and Ludmila. Hopefully they’re as good as they look, because they look gorgeous; like classical fantasy art brought to life. Another box set making its way from the US into my hands this month was Severin’s Cushing Curiosities (featuring the films Cone of Silence, Suspect, The Man Who Finally Died, Blood Suckers, and Tender Dracula, plus the surviving episodes of Cushing’s BBC Sherlock Holmes series), which I picked up in their sale alongside a trio of Dario Argento titles: 4K UHD releases of The Five Days and Opera (aka Terror at the Opera in the UK), and the rarities collection Dario Argento’s Deep Cuts (which possibly doesn’t merit listing here as a lot of it is made-for-TV content, but I’ve mentioned it now, so there we go).

Back at home, this month’s only brand-new released was The Fall Guy in 4K, but the boutiques drained my bank account as thoroughly as ever: from Arrow, Robert Rodriguez’s Mexico Trilogy, including a 4K disc for Desperado (probably the best-regarded of the three, and also the only one I’ve never seen, having caught Once Upon a Time in Mexico in the cinema back in 2003 and El Mariachi on a previous DVD version of this trilogy set); from Eureka in the Masters of Cinema range, Kinji Fukasaku’s yakuza classic Wolves, Pigs & Men; and from Radiance, more gangsters in Tai Kato’s Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza, plus their second World Noir box set (encompassing Germany’s Black Gravel, France’s Symphony for a Massacre, and Japan’s Cruel Gun Story); plus, excitingly, from partner label Raro Video, The Italian Connection, which completes Fernando Di Leo’s Milieu Trilogy (alongside a Raro release from earlier this year, The Boss, and a title Arrow put out nine years ago, Milano Calibro 9). Finally (literally, because it’s officially out today but my copy turned up on the last day of August), 101 Films’ UHD upgrade for Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, which I intended to watch back when I was watching all of Villeneuve’s earlier films in the run up to Dune, but didn’t and so is a possibility for this year’s WDYMYHS list.

I say “finally” — I bought a further 16 titles in sales of one kind or another. From the US, A*P*E in 3D; George A. Romero’s Creepshow in 4K plus Just Desserts: The Making of Creepshow; Flicker Alley’s Argentinian noir Never Open That Door; a couple of US-exclusive titles from UK labels: Arrow’s release of John Wayne’s final film, The Shootist, and Indicator release Untouched (which, somewhat aptly given its title, is a US-only release because the BBFC insisted on cuts); and Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell and Walker. And from the UK, a quartet of StudioCanal Cult Classics: Blazing Magnum, Devil Girl from Mars, The Final Programme, and Horrors of the Black Museum; the BFI’s 4K of Full Circle (aka The Haunting of Julia) and volume 3 of their Short Sharp Shocks series; classic ghost story The Queen of Spades; and Lisa Joy’s Hugh Jackman-starring sci-fi noir Reminiscence. When you lay it out like that, it kinda sounds like I have a problem. But shh, don’t tell anyone, because then I might have to deal with it.

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 current big news on the big screen is undoubtedly Deadpool & Wolverine, which I might have actually gone to see if I hadn’t been busy this past weekend. Social media reaction seems divided: the fanboys love it (of course they do), while more serious-minded critics are cautious bordering on negative. I might still make the effort this coming weekend, or it might join the long list of post-Endgame MCU titles I just haven’t got round to. The fact it’s something oaan capstone to the Fox era of superhero movies sways me more in its favour, but still, we’ll see.

Also filling multiplexes were routine animated sequel Despicable Me 4 and belated, nostalgia-fuelled blockbuster sequel Twisters. I’ll inevitably catch both eventually, but I still haven’t seen the last Minions film and it took me a couple of decades to get round to the first Twister — which is no more than a perfectly adequate film — so I’m hardly in a rush. Of more interest are Kill, an Indian action film that I’ve heard is very good (to the extent that John Wick’s Chad Stahelski is already working on a US remake), and I Saw the TV Glow, which feels like it’s been attracting praise on Letterboxd forever but has only now made it to UK screens. Nonetheless, I’ll wait for discs on both of those (not least my local isn’t screening them). And further down my future watchlist, a pair of horrors: Longlegs, which seems to have provoked a lot of chatter, mainly about Nic Cage’s performance, which makes it interesting to me; and MaXXXine, but I’ve not seen X or Pearl yet so that one’s a ways down the list.

In theatrical-adjacent news, Amazon Prime Video finally brought Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to the UK. All of Ritchie’s films seem to go direct to Amazon here these days, for good or ill. It’s a bit of a coin-toss whether I’ll get round to it anytime soon or not, but it’s definitely on the watchlist. Amazon seemed to be leading the way with original premieres this month, also debuting sequel My Spy: The Eternal City (I never caved to watching the original, even during the pandemic, so this is hardly a priority for me) and Space Cadet (this sounds kinda like “Legally Blonde in space”, which mildly tempts me, but reviews are terrible). All I have noted down for Netflix, on the other hand, is original anime The Imaginary. Sky / NOW also got in on the action with a modern-day kid-friendly spin on the Robin Hood legend, Robin and the Hoods; while I do believe Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea had some kind of theatrical release, but it was so limited that its Disney+ debut is basically a premiere.

Other films making their way to streaming post-theatrical included Wicked Little Letters on Netflix, which looks fun; The Iron Claw on Amazon, which seemed to attract positive buzz when it was in US cinemas; and on Sky / NOW, box office surprise smash romcom Anyone But You, the musical remake of Mean Girls, and Chinese animation (that I saw recommended somewhere) Deep Sea. Also Jericho Ridge, which I’d not heard of before it popped up on NOW, but its Assault on Precinct 13-esque premise sounded neat. And I don’t imagine it had a theatrical release, but it’s out on disc, so Amazon saved me having to pay for Bruceploitation (i.e. Bruce Lee exploitation) documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce. I say “saved” — that’s relative to me actually watching it before it’s inevitably removed one day…

There were back catalogue comings and goings a-go-go, of course, though what caught my eye this month was a large vein of things I’ve upgraded to 4K on disc but not (re)watched yet. Those included (deep breath) The Babadook, Black Hawk Down, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Deep Impact, Dr Who and the Daleks and its sequel, Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, Drive, Enter the Dragon, the original Ghost in the Shell, Gladiator (really should revisit that before its sequel lands), The Green Mile, The Revenant, RoboCop (more on that later), RoboCop 2 (that too), The Shawshank Redemption, Top Gun: Maverick (which I also should’ve reviewed by now), and Training Day. Not to mention all the stuff I’ve just straight up bought on 4K and not watched yet, like Elvis, Possessor, The Sisters Brothers, and The Batman (it’s absolutely ridiculous that I still haven’t watched that). I expect I could generate a similarly lengthy list of films I own on unwatched Blu-rays that are now ‘free’ on streaming — though one that did stand out to me was Gravity, because it’s currently on both Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer and it reminded me I’ve never watched it in 3D, despite owning a 3D TV for over seven years now. Same goes for Dredd (which was streaming on Channel 4 this month) and… well, plenty of other things (that aren’t currently streaming; and probably some that are).

None of which stops me buying piles of new discs, of course, including several that could feature in the above list — indeed, two do: RoboCop, which I finally picked up in Arrow’s recent sale; and the recently-released RoboCop 2 (from the US, because I did one of my bulk orders again). Other upgrades thanks to the Arrow sale included Time Bandits (it would’ve been neat to watch that before the new TV version started, wouldn’t it?) and Videodrome; while other 4Ks in that US order included giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris, an upgrade all the way from DVD for The Departed, and Criterion editions of I Am Cuba, McCabe & Mrs Miller, and The Red Shoes.

Back in the UK, 4K new releases included both brand-new titles like Alex Garland’s Civil War and Dev Patel’s Monkey Man (both of which I’m keen to see, so it’s daft they’re having to be featured here), plus new releases for older titles, like Second Sight’s A Bittersweet Life, Indicator’s Bruiser (which means I now own all of George A Romero’s feature films in HD or 4K), Arrow’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Curzon’s Memories of Murder.

Comparatively, I have very few regular ol’ HD titles to note. From Radiance’s latest slate, I limited myself to just Tai Kato’s Eighteen Years in Prison (yes, this is me trying to cut back), plus their partner label Raro Video’s release of Michael “Witchfinder General” Reeves’s Revenge of the Blood Beast (more commonly known online as The She Beast). I also finally upgraded classic TV series The Prisoner to HD, importing the recent Imprint release from Australia — it surely cost more than Network’s release would have back in the day, but that’s out of print (RIP Network) and at least this one comes with more special features (overall — it is missing a couple). Along with that, I finally stumped for an HD copy of the 2003 Zatoichi (there have been various releases, none of which seem to have the quite right PQ, but most of which do look better than my old DVD) and my most ridiculous purchase of the month, David Lynch’s Dune — ridiculous because I already own Arrow’s 4K release, but I bought this version for feature-length behind-the-scenes documentary The Sleeper Must Awaken: Making Dune. Was that a reasonable purchase? I guess it depends how good the doc is. I’ll have to actually watch it to find out.

May’s Failures

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It’s some kind of irony that this month I failed to get my failures post written in a timely fashion (not that I think anyone particularly cares about it being late), but I’ve been struggling with a nasty cold the past few days and so had neither the time nor energy to devote to it.

No such excuses for not making it to the cinema last month, just my general lackadaisical attitude to catching films on the big screen. That makes me a contributor to the underwhelming box office of The Fall Guy and Furiosa, as well as Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes — all films I’m very much looking forward to seeing, for one reason or another (mostly: the trailers look good; but also the franchise pedigree of the latter two). Other theatrical releases in the past month that I might watch at some point but, frankly, I was never going to go out of my way to see included The Garfield Movie, Love Lies Bleeding, Tarot, Young Woman and the Sea, and If (no connection to if…., but that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m liable to make a joke about if I ever review it — see my review of Frozen for similar).

Streaming original premieres looked even weaker than normal by comparison to that lot, with the most noteworthy probably being Jerry Seinfeld Pop-Tarts comedy Unfrosted (I saw a clip of the ‘surprise’ Mad Men cameos on Twitter. Thank goodness I didn’t watch the whole thing for that). Netflix also offered sci-fi Atlas, with a moderately name-y cast, but I’ve not seen a single person mention it, before or after release, which I figure doesn’t bode well for its quality. Over on Amazon, there was Harry Styles-inspired romcom The Idea of You and, um, the movie edit of Roku-premiering TV series Die Hart 2: Die Harter. (Implausibly, that’s been recommissioned for a third season, so I guess there’ll be a third “movie” as an “Amazon Original” at some point in the future, too.)

It was a relatively thin month for theatrical releases making their streaming debuts, too, with Disney+ only offering horror prequel The First Omen and Sky Cinema on the same “revived ’70s horror series” bandwagon with The Exorcist: Believer, plus minor-league DC superhero Blue Beetle (is it in continuity with that studio’s forthcoming films or not? I forget) and another “somewhat implausible it even got commissioned” action threequel, The Equalizer 3. More significantly, Amazon Prime debuted dystopian YA prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (which I already own on disc) and Netflix surprised everyone with Godzilla Minus One (technically on June 1st, but as that’s already a few days ago I thought I may as well include it). With any information about a Western home video release for that most recent Japanese Godzilla flick being kept as quiet as a state secret, I’d already joined the crowd in pirating the thing; and I cancelled my Netflix subscription at the end of May too, so I’ll still watch that downloaded copy at some point. (I can’t say I feel too guilty about that considering I’ll surely buy it on disc, when/if they ever announce one over here.)

There was, of course, the usual glut of back catalogue titles hopping from one service to another or just plain popping up again, with particularly notable ones including The Black Phone, Brian and Charles, Bullet Train, and Minions: The Rise of Gru on Netflix (as I say, I’ve cancelled my sub, but I do have access to the latter two films in other ways); Amores Perros, Bone Tomahawk, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Natural Born Killers, The Others, and Studio 666 on Prime Video, along with a bunch of Gamera films (I confess, I’ve still not even opened the Arrow box set I bought back when it first came out, so long ago I dread to even look up when that was); on Channel 4, Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Presidents, Moonfall, and multiple titles I’ve bought on 4K disc but not got round to (re)watching, including Carlito’s Way, Collateral, Fanny Lye Deliver’d, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, and George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing; and the BBC seem to have been having a bit of a Christopher Nolan season, with the TV premiere of Tenet, plus Dunkirk, Memento, and the one I particularly want to note, The Prestige — I haven’t seen it since a DVD rewatch 16 years ago, and I bought the 4K disc a while back, so there are multiple reasons it’s long overdue a revisit.

You might think facts and lists like those in the last paragraph would stop me buying more films on disc — but if you thought that, it would show you don’t know me very well at all. The wild and wonderful additions to my ever-expanding, storage-space-challenging collection this past month include multiple new-to-4K titles like The Dreamers, Dune: Part Two, The Valiant Ones, and, despite the controversy surrounding its presentation, Once Upon a Time in the West. Talking of controversy, I also bought some bootleg releases this month — not something I normally do, but I happened to discover eBay sales for the Hong Kong Rescue editions of Hard Boiled, The Killer, and Peking Opera Blues. If official releases seemed imminent, or even likely, I’d have happily waited (other films released by HKR have since had genuine releases, and I’ve bought those instead), but the rights for at least two of these titles are apparently-impossibly entangled (and people keep requesting Peking Opera Blues and it keeps not coming out, so I presume there’s some problem there as well), so I caved.

There was more Hong Kong action in 88 Films’ release of Jackie Chan-starring Fearless Hyena Part II, plus their release of British-produced Western Hannie Caulder. The BFI released Stephen Poliakoff’s film debut, thriller Hidden City, while Indicator returned to their Columbia Noir series for a sixth volume, this time encompassing eight-film crime series the Whistler. Finally (although I think it must’ve been more-or-less the first thing to arrive, because it doesn’t feel like it was only this month), another pile of titles from the US, this time from Vinegar Syndrome partner labels. I think there was an offer on, though my interest was initially piqued by a forthcoming local screening of Russian sci-fi Kin-Dza-Dza!, which led me to discover the Deaf Crocodile Blu-ray release, which led me to a mix of other stuff I’d had an eye on (animations Cat City and Heroic Times) and stuff that captured my attention while browsing: sometime Letterboxd fave All About Lily Chou-Chou; video store documentary Mom n’ Pop; and “rotoscoped time travel Western” Quantum Cowboys. This is really the “wild and wonderful” stuff I was referring to earlier. Whether or not they’re also “good”, I’ll find out whenever I finally get round to watching any of them…

March’s Failures

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As I mentioned at the start of my March review, I’ve spent a lot of time this past month on things that aren’t films. Does that mean my pile of failures is even more shocking than normal? No, not really — I mean, it could scarcely get much bigger, could it? And I actually went to the cinema once this month too, so there’s even one less title in that paragraph than there’d normally be.

In fact, I’d hoped to make it to the cinema twice this month — Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire was my other targeted release — but family Easter weekend plans got in the way. I’m busy next weekend too, but maybe I’ll find a weeknight for it or something. I’m sure it’s the kind of film that would benefit from the big screen (I felt the same way about its predecessor, which I only saw at home, thanks in part to it coming out in The Covid Times). I nearly made it three trips, even, because I was tempted by Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. I knew the reviews would be poor to middling, but they were so bad it put me right off. I’ll definitely catch it on disc, though. Other silver screen releases this month that I’ll definitely catch on disc were Kung Fu Panda 4 (I enjoyed the first three, but not enough to make the effort for this one at the cinema) and the latest semi-Coen brothers film (in that it’s directed by just one of them), Drive-Away Dolls, which looked fun.

I thought the streamers’ premieres this month would fare better, but I didn’t make time for several of those either (maybe choosing to spend so much time on other stuff had more of an impact than I allowed in my opening paragraph). Top of my watchlist were Netflix’s fantasy actioner Damsel and thoughtful sci-fi Spaceman, plus Amazon Prime’s remake of Road House — not that I’ve ever seen the original, but this version boasts Doug Liman as director and Jake Gyllenhaal as star, both of which appeal to me. Well, now they’re here to count towards my Challenge in the Failures category next month, so that might improve their chances (for at least one of them, anyway).

Other films premiering on streaming included football (aka soccer) true story The Beautiful Game (not a sport I care about, but this boasts a cast led by Bill Nighy), a new all-action remake of The Wages of Fear, Pierce Brosnan in Fast Charlie (which I seem to remember seeing a trailer for and thinking it looked fun enough), and slushy romcom nonsense with a nigh-unsayable title, Irish Wish. I only mention that last one because everything about it seems like a total disaster. I won’t be watching (so it’s not really a “failure”, but I think we long ago passed that being a genuine litmus test for what I mention in this column).

Other big-name titles making their subscription streaming debuts included Ridley Scott’s Napoleon on Apple TV+; Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla on MUBI; three-and-a-half-hour concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour on Disney+, which also had Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins and six-time BAFTA nominee All of Us Strangers. Talking of awards nominees, Oscar winners abound, from Poor Things on Disney+ (much to the confusion of many Americans, based on social media), to American Fiction and Anatomy of a Fall on Amazon, to 20 Days in Mariupol on Channel 4, via all sorts of stuff on Netflix: acting nominees Nyad and Rustin; documentaries American Symphony and To Kill a Tiger; shorts The After and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar — the latter of which was one of four Wes Anderson Roald Dahl shorts that he apparently insisted were released as individual films so no one would judge them as a portmanteau feature, but which Netflix have now made available as a portmanteau feature, title The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More.

Talking of the Oscars, every February/March I get the offer of a cut-price Sky Cinema subscription from NOW, which used to be great for watching the Oscars on Sky. But, starting this year, here in the UK the ceremony is now broadcast free on ITV, so I don’t need to get Sky even at that budget price — hurrah! Except they’re still the streaming home to tonnes of recent movies, of course, so I took the offer anyway. That means my watchlist has been flooded with a mass of stuff that was previously locked away. We’re talking The Beekeeper (wasn’t that only in cinemas, like, the other week?), Michael Mann’s Ferrari (apparently a “Sky Original” — oh dear), Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City (eesh, I haven’t even watched The French Dispatch on Disney+ yet), Fast X, The Super Mario Bros Movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, No Hard Feelings, Polite Society, Gran Turismo, May December, Violent Night, The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan, Renfield, Beau Is Afraid, She Said; plus superhero movies I kinda want to see even though they’re meant to be awful, like The Flash and Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods; and more back catalogue stuff that I’ve added to my watchlist but don’t even care enough to list here, so I’m not likely to actually watch any of it, am I? (But you never know…)

As if that wasn’t enough, the other streamers are also always bolstering their back catalogue. Most noteworthy among these also-rans for me was RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop on Amazon Prime. This making-of documentary is meant to be so good that I nearly bought it on Blu-ray. It’s not even just “a documentary”, but a four-part series totalling almost five hours. As making-ofs go, that’s rather incredible. I mean, I remember when the Twelve Monkeys DVD was exalted for having an hour-long making-of. Obviously, things like the Lord of the Rings appendices reshaped expectations in that regard, but those remained a rarity, and similar extravagances have been cut back with time (nowadays, even huge popular blockbusters typically get no more than 45 to 60 minutes of behind-the-scenes material, often split across multiple sub-ten-minute featurettes). That said, when I’m likely to make time for such an undertaking, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never actually got round to watching those Rings appendices, and I’m a much bigger fan of those films than I am of RoboCop.

Though that was one title I avoided buying on disc, this month (as with most months, to be honest) the streamers have been flooded with stuff to remind me I haven’t yet watched my bought-and-paid-for copy —from things I’ve never seen, like Michael Mann’s Ali and The Last of the Mohicans, the new Candyman, Drive My Car, The Kid Who Would Be King, Legends of the Fall, The Long Good Friday, Mazes and Monsters, Out of Sight, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Weathering with You; to things I’ve upgraded but not watched my new copy, like Drive, The Godfather trilogy, The Guest, La La Land, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; to stuff I’ve simply been meaning to revisit, like Catch Me If You Can, The Martian, The Matrix Resurrections, and The Third Man. And those are just some edited highlights.

Then there’s all the new discs I’ve been buying to further enlarge my collection. Only a handful of them were 4K this month: Ozploitation sci-fi horror Patrick from Indicator; bodyswap sci-fi horror Possessor from Second Sight; and folk horror Witchfinder General from 88 Films. Horror always seems to be at the forefront of new formats… though I’m not sure we can still call 4K a new format at this point. But nonetheless, plenty of deeper-cut horror movies are finding their way onto 4K discs while studios still twiddle their thumbs about releasing major titles on the format, so my point stands. That said, some much-anticipated studio titles did make it to the disc this month, in the form of a trio of long-awaited James Cameron films… and they were pretty universally derided for their ‘restored’ (read: modernised) picture quality. I’ve wanted True Lies on disc for decades, but I’m skipping it based on what I’ve read and seen (for now — maybe I’ll cave when it’s cheap. I mean, it’s likely this is the only version we’ll ever get). The one I did pick up is apparently the least-bad, The Abyss. Frankly, the DVD is so ancient, almost anything will be an improvement.

That aside, I have no other ‘major’ titles to mention this month, only new releases of older films from boutique labels. As seems to be commonplace nowadays, lots of martial arts-related titles, with a duo of duos from Eureka — the two Bodyguard Kiba films, and a double-feature of influential titles, The Swordsman of All Swordsmen and The Mystery of Chess Boxing — plus a box set of the Bounty Hunter trilogy from Radiance and The Inspector Wears Skirts 2 from 88 Films. Indicator mix things up with a trio of lucha libre films: Santo vs. the Riders of Terror, The Panther Women, and The Bat Woman (which I’ve sort of seen thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000 taking it on last season). Rounding things out, some releases I can’t neatly combine in thematic bundles: the latest silent movie restoration from Redwood Creek Films, the 1928 version of The Fall of the House of Usher (at least the third screen adaptation of that story I own); River, another time loop film from the makers of Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (which I also haven’t watched); and Italian gangster actioner Tony Arzenta (aka Big Guns or No Way Out), which reportedly plays like a sequel to Le Samouraï (another film I’ve been intending to watch for decades).

The important thing to take away from all that is… I need more time to watch movies. But hey, at least there’s plenty of choice to fulfil the Failures category next month.

November’s Failures

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Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was high on the list of titles I thought might tempt me out to the cinema in the closing months of the year, but it hasn’t managed it yet — and, with December being as December is, I doubt it will now. (The one remaining big “maybe” is Godzilla Minus One, which is out on the 15th over here. Come back next month to see if that happens…) A close second was wordily-titled prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, because I enjoyed the original “trilogy in four parts”, but, again, it couldn’t quite get me over the line (perhaps it’s no surprise, as I watched all of the rest on Blu-ray).

Noticeably less tempting were Disney’s latest flops, The Marvels (I’m so far behind on the MCU now) and Wish (can’t remember when I last saw a Disney animation at the cinema. Always feels a bit weird going alone as a 30-something bloke). Of smaller scale releases that go on my list to catch somewhere eventually, there was the likes of Emerald Fennel’s Saltburn, festival hit Anatomy of a Fall, horror Thanksgiving, much-discussed on Twitter this weekend May December (I believe it’s already on Netflix in the US, but has been condemned to Sky Cinema over here), and a belated UK release for Bottoms.

Streaming had a premiere of more interest to me than any of those, however, in the shape of David Fincher’s latest, The Killer, on Netflix. I was going to cancel my Netflix subscription at the end of October due to the imminent price rise, but kept it going to catch The Killer in early November, but then events conspired against me and I still haven’t got to it. Of course, mentioning it here now gives me extra motivation, as it now qualifies under an additional category in my Challenge. I wish I didn’t think like that about my film viewing, but when I find so little time for it and the Challenge requires so many films…

According to my notes, there was little else brand-new of note on the streamers this past month; just Adam Sandler animation Leo (also Netflix), romantic sci-fi Fingernails getting lost on Apple TV+, and an aged-up Pierce Brosnan as The Last Rifleman on Sky Cinema. The latter continue to dominate in terms of streaming debuts, this month boasting Beau is Afraid, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Renfield, and Violent Night. All of which said, I don’t currently subscribe to Sky/Now, so probably shouldn’t be noting them as “failures”. Normally I’d pick it up in late January or February for the Oscars, but as those have moved to ITV now, I have considerably less cause to. Sure, there’s all the films, but it’s not as if I don’t have enough to watch as it is.

Of note on the rest of the streamers, Branagh’s latest Poirot, A Haunting in Venice, came to Disney+ in 4K — a format it’s been denied on disc, so I’ll be streaming it instead of buying it. They also had a real oddity: miniseries Faraway Downs, which is Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia extended and re-cut into a six-parter. Mainly, it’s reminded me I’ve never quite got round to watching the film… which is 15 years old. My perception of time is all kinds of messed up. No other streamer can boast anything quite so irritating as the third film in a series not getting a 4K release when the previous two did, nor so unusual as an old movie being recut into a TV series, but of particular note padding out my never-ending watchlist on other providers were Jackass Forever, Reminiscence, and Studio 666 on Netflix; unloved Oscar nominee Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I only feel I need to see to tick that box) on Amazon Prime; 1970s Miyazaki shot Yuki’s Sun on MUBI; on Channel 4, a bunch of foreign titles I’ve heard good things about, like Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Riders of Justice, Hit the Road, and Petite Maman; and a French remake of One Cut of the Dead, Final Cut, on iPlayer, along with a load of Shakespeare stuff I’d like to watch thanks to BBC Four’s recent season about the Bard. I’m not going to get into listing all of that, though.

As for physical media purchases, the end of November brings with it Black Friday, and while I didn’t go actively hunting for deals, a few were too good to miss, like Curzon’s 4K box set of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy, plus their 4K release of his The Double Life of Veronique. Across general two-for-what-have-you offers and other such discount, I also upgraded Interstellar (from Blu-ray) and Event Horizon (from DVD), and picked up a couple of classics I feel I should have seen but that never seem to crop up on streaming anywhere, Rebel Without a Cause and Rosemary’s Baby. I also finally found a price I was happy with for the 4K set of The Godfather Trilogy, which I haven’t watched since the DVD era — which presents a big question for the next rewatch: Parts I and II are easy enough, but do I conclude with Part III or its recent recut, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone? The set now presents that as the definitive version, with the original cuts of Part III relegated to special features status. Maybe that answers the question for me.

There were a few new releases on 4K too, headlined by a pair I thought might never happen. The most egregious would’ve been the fourth and final film in the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, Evangelion:3.0+1.11 Thrice Upon a Time. When Amazon snaffled up the streaming rights, I was concerned I’d never be able to complete my discs collection; but, a couple of years later, here it is. I’m less thorough about my Predator collection, but Prey is one of the best films in that series and so I’m thrilled to see Disney+ titles like that making it to disc now. There are a good few more I hope we’ll see at some point. Maybe they’ll even persuade Netflix to join in eventually (I want Glass Onion, goddammit!) Less startling, but obviously welcome, was Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (which is gonna look silly if they do retitle Part Two now), plus I took a punt on Arrow’s release of Tremors 2: Aftershocks (direct-to-video sequels obviously have a bad rep, but the very fact they’ve decided this was worth doing says something… hopefully…)

Finally for 4K, I imported Kino’s release of The Train, mainly because the film comes strongly recommended by Christopher “director of one of the greatest train sequences of all time” McQuarrie (which, as you may or may not remember, also merited a mention last month because it was on TV right after I placed the order for this disc copy). I rarely order one thing at a time from the States, and so along with that came ’50s sci-fi B-movie Robot Monster in 3D (probably not a great film, but the disc is packed with stereoscopic goodies), and a double bill of Douglas Fairbanks double bills, seeing the silent star swashbuckle his way through Robin Hood, The Black Pirate, The Three Musketeers, and The Iron Mask.

There were two other foursomes this month, too: Arrow’s second box set of sundry Spaghetti Westerns, Blood Money, and Eureka’s amusingly-titled collection of Mr. Vampire sequels, Hopping Mad. Yes, after watching the original back in May to decide whether I wanted to order the sequel set, I finally did. Will it be another six months before I actually watch any of them? Knowing me, no — it’ll be much, much longer.

October’s Failures

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Let’s start with what is easily this month’s biggest failure: Poor Things. No, it’s not out in the UK until January, but it was the highest-profile film screening at this year’s FilmBath Festival, and I had a ticket, but in the end I couldn’t make it, primarily thanks to lingering effects from when I had Covid. Damn. Other films of particular interest at the festival that I didn’t see for one reason or another included The Bikeriders (well received at other festivals and, just before its Bath screening, its general release was pushed back from December to sometime in 2024) and the new film by Carol Morley, Typist Artist Pirate King, which is now on general release. And… it’s not that there weren’t other interesting films screened at the festival this year, but nothing much major enough to warrant a mention.

On general release, the biggest news has to be the latest from Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon. Unless you’re of a certain age, that is, because apparently Five Nights at Freddy’s is a phenomenon-sized franchise to kids (so I’m told) and thus the (first) film did stonking business (in the US, at least — I’ve no idea if this is one of those genuine worldwide phenomenons or one of those US-centric ones that The Internet therefore portrays as global). Other big screen releases — of varying size, quality, and success — included legacy sequel The Exorcist: Believer, Michael Caine’s final role in The Great Escaper, kiddy franchise entries Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie and Trolls Band Together, emotional sci-fi Foe, and the latest attempt at reviving the Hammer brand, a modern reimagining of the sci-fi/horror classic, Doctor Jekyll. Allegedly there was also a theatrical release for David Fincher’s latest, but as that’s from Netflix it isn’t screening anywhere round me, so I shan’t deign to mention it by name. It’ll be in next month’s column, unless I actually watch it (I intend to, but my intentions often mean nowt).

Speaking of Netflix, I think their primary original this month was Pain Hustlers, which is almost notable for being director David Yates’s first non-blockbuster work in 18 years… except, after gradually eroding his talent/promise on seven Wizarding World movies, I’m not sure anyone particularly cares about Yates as a director anymore. Plus this new movie’s meant to be a bit shite, so that won’t help. Whatever happened to the guy who directed the original State of Play and Sex Traffic miniseries? Well, the Wizarding World / two decades of blockbuster work, I guess. Also new to Netflix were Fair Play, another attempt to revive the erotic thriller subgenre that apparently fails due to modern prudishness, and Ballerina — not the long-awaited John Wick spinoff, but another action movie; a Korean one, to be mildly more precise. The fact I’ve not seen anyone on Twitter going, “hey, you should check out this new Asian action movie on Netflix that you probably missed!” suggests it probably isn’t that great (because most new Asian action movies on Netflix seem to attract that kind of recommendation from someone).

I think Amazon were the only steamer to put any effort into providing a horror-themed original for Halloween, with time travel-themed ’80s throwback Totally Killer. Not that other streamers opted out entirely, mind, be it streaming premieres — the new Haunted Mansion on Disney+; the likes of Infinity Pool, Pearl, and The Pope’s Exorcist on Sky Cinema; Talk to Me on Netflix — or older fare… which, frankly, are too numerous to mention. As I said in my September review, I’ve never been one to spend all of October watching horror, but I’m sure I could’ve done, and one day maybe I will.

There were some other themes to this month’s streaming offerings, though, like original shorts: Disney’s official 100th anniversary celebration, Once Upon a Studio, and Pedro Almodóvar’s gay Western, Strange Way of Life, on MUBI. BBC Four have been having some kind of Shakespeare season, which then extends onto iPlayer. It’s largely been TV adaptations, but a few films have come through too, like the 1950s Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando, James Mason, John Gielgud, and Deborah Kerr; Laurence Olivier’s Richard III; and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (which I’ve seen but have long intended to revisit).

There also seemed to be an exceptional number of films I already own (or, erm, have downloaded) coming to streaming before I could watch them. As usual, that was mostly on Sky Cinema, with titles like of Cocaine Bear, The Fabelmans, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and Searching sequel Missing. To be honest, I think this says more about my recent (as in, year-long) failure to keep up with newer releases/purchases than it has anything to say about an abundance of new stuff on streaming. That’s without even counting titles further into the back catalogue, or that have been around for long enough to leave streaming and come back, like Licorice Pizza (formerly of Amazon Prime, now on iPlayer), or the Candyman legacy sequel (also on iPlayer), or Another Round, Boiling Point, and Censor (all streaming on Channel 4). Heck, even purchases that haven’t arrived yet are getting in on the act: the day I placed an order for the US 4K release of The Train, it popped up on iPlayer. Well, at least I’ll get to watch it in 4K. One day (expect to see it in next month’s failures. Or maybe I’ll watch my 4K disc to cross off this month’s mention of it from streaming…)

Talking of things I’ve bought, no impairment can slow down my insane rate of disc purchases! Where to begin? Let’s sort them by label, starting with the large package that turned up this month from Australia’s Umbrella — large in part because of multiple titles, and in part because some of those titles are of the “lavish box set” variety. I mean, Razorback is not only a single film in a box roughly the depth of four regular Blu-rays, it also came with a T-shirt and an action figure. Although, the action figure — of the eponymous boar — doesn’t have any articulation, so maybe “in-action figure” would be more accurate. Not that it’ll ever leave its packaging. Also in that box from Oz, listed in order of decreasing thickness of edition: Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, Indiana Jones rip-off Sky Pirates, low-budget horror Undead, and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which at one time looked like the only disc release for that Roku-exclusive film, but now it’s coming in the US with new extras being worked on, so I may slightly regret that purchase. Oh well.

There was also a sizeable pile from Radiance, headlined by sold-out-on-preorder horror Messiah of Evil and accompanied by The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, The Hot Spot, The Iron Prefect, and Visible Secret, plus partner label title The Night of the Devils. I may not watch many horror movies in October, but clearly I do buy them (well, it’s what the labels choose to put out, isn’t it?) That continued with my latest acquisitions from Indicator, including the two new additions to their Jean Rollin collection, Fascination and Lips of Blood, plus pre-Code crime drama Thunderbolt, and the second six-film set in their Universal Noir range.

Another multi-film set was Criterion’s release of Tod Browning’s Sideshow Shockers, headlined by his famous Freaks but accompanied by lesser-known silents The Mystic and The Unknown. For some reason I assumed it wouldn’t get a UK release, so I was pleasantly surprised when it did. Even better, in some respects, was Martin Scorsese’s After Hours — Criterion’s first 4K release in the UK market. Hurrah!

A more recurring theme amongst my purchases is classic Asian action movies, thanks to several labels doing grand work in that field nowadays. The regulars are 88 Films — who this month delivered a fancier re-release of Jackie Chan’s Battle Creek Brawl; a similarly lavish edition of Chan’s Twin Dragons; a film labelled Hard Boiled II over here but that really has nothing to do with John Woo’s classic, The Last Blood; and, last but not least, The Postman Fights Back — and Eureka, with James Bond spoof From Beijing with Love and epic Beach of the War Gods.

But it was another title from Eureka, this time in their sporadic Masters of Cinema line, that was my most anticipated this month — indeed, it fills the “disc” slot on the post’s header image (has anyone noticed that the three images up top come from the same specific media each month? I doubt it). That’s silent era classic Pandora’s Box, making it’s long-awaited debut on a UK Blu-ray (it’s over 20 years since there was a DVD release here, and Criterion’s DVD is out of print and thus goes for silly prices). I’ve waited so long for that to come out, and now I can… proudly put it on a shelf and not get round to it, knowing me. I despair of myself.

September’s Failures

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I was nearly tempted out to the actual cinema again in September. Ever since I first started seeing trailers for Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, I thought it looked promising — especially as I’ve enjoyed all of his previous films — and the recent word of mouth, since it started screening for critics, has suggested it would live up to those expectations. But it’s only just come out, and I was busy this weekend, so hopefully I can now make time for it in the next week or two.

Elsewhere, a lot of cinema bows this month were new entries in series, most of them ones I follow. A Haunting in Venice is the third of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot adaptations. If its box office is anything to go by, it might be the last. I hope not, because I’ve been enjoying them. The Saw series returned from the dead — again — with Saw X. It’s a franchise of variable quality, but one I actually enjoy overall, though I never rush to catch a new instalment. I’ll be sure to catch it eventually, probably once it’s available on a service I already subscribe to. The same goes for the belated fourth entry in the Expendables series, which is apparently officially titled Expend4bles. It’s meant to be pretty awful, but then people have said that about every other film in the series so far, and I’ve mostly thought they were… alright. So, yeah, another one I’ll catch eventually. And the same can be said again of The Equalizer 3. Quite how that’s legged out to a trilogy, I don’t know — again, I’d describe each of the previous films as “alright”, but nothing about them screams “more is required”. But — as with all the others in this paragraph — I like them enough to watch it eventually.

An even more unlikely threequel is My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. I remember the first one being a breakout hit back in 2002, and the first sequel — coming almost 15 years later — feeling like a desperate attempt to revive a once-popular-but-now-forgotten phenomenon. Quite how that non-event led to a third go-round, I don’t know. At almost the other end of the spectrum, Past Lives also hit UK screens last month. Well, I don’t know where it sits on that spectrum — I don’t really know what it’s about, other than people seem to like it because I’ve seen it ranked highly on Letterboxd. Very much the kind of film I’m not going to rush to the cinema to see, but if it’s that good, I’ll find out what it actually is — and watch it, no doubt — at some point in the future.

As for interesting premieres on streaming, there really only seemed to be two, both released right at the end of the month — and one of them isn’t even a film. That would be Wes Anderson’s collection of Roald Dahl-adapted shorts for Netflix, led by The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and continuing with The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison. I’ve seen some query why these weren’t bundled into a portmanteau feature, a la the Coen brothers’ Netflix film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs; or at least lumped together as a ‘series’, rather than having their own separate listings. But I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that this is how Anderson wanted it; for them to be considered as four distinct shorts, not a de facto feature.

The other title of note was No One Will Save You on Disney+ (or Hulu if you’re in the States). I believe it’s some kind of sci-fi/horror movie that’s told without any dialogue, but I confess I don’t really know too much about it, because I hadn’t even heard of it before the day it came out, when I kept seeing critics pointing it out on Twitter, as if I would know what it was. Anyway, I’ve not read too much more for the sake of staying spoiler free, but it sounds intriguing. That said, there were a couple of other streaming debuts this month, but I find it hard to get excited for Robert Rodriguez rebooting Spy Kids again in Spy Kids: Armageddon, and Netflix don’t seem to have done much to push Reptile beyond “it stars Benicio del Toro” — if I couldn’t tell you much about No One Will Save You, I could tell you even less about that.

Of course, there were the usual array of theatrical releases making their streaming debuts. Disney continue to keep their theatrical releases as short as possible, with the live-action The Little Mermaid and Pixar’s Elemental already available to stream. Things take a little longer to reach Sky Cinema, where this month the most noteworthy additions were titles I own on disc but haven’t got round to: Knock at the Cabin, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and Scream VI; plus Tár, which I’ve now mentioned in this column three months on the trot. Really ought to get round to it…

In terms if back catalogue titles, MUBI proved the most interesting, with the likes of David Lynch’s obscure 1988 short The Cowboy and the Frenchman, Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and Nothing Sacred, a film I’d never heard of but which they bill as “an utterly charming, wisecrack-filled screwball comedy shot in the vibrantly weird palette of early Technicolor”. Sounds neat. Similarly niche is Róise & Frank, which I remember noting when it screened at FilmBath last year — because it’s about a widow who meets a dog she believes is her husband reincarnated, and regular readers will know how much I love a “cute dog” movie — and now it’s as accessible as can be on iPlayer.

Netflix’s offerings were, unsurprisingly, a bit more mainstream, including Wonder Woman 1984 (which I’ve had downloaded in 3D for yonks — I’m very behind on superhero movies), recent-ish reboots like Mortal Kombat and Tom & Jerry, Covid-era heist thriller Locked Down, plus both the 2013 Evil Dead remake/reboot/whatever and this year’s Evil Dead Rise. Now there’s a franchise I need to re-engage with the whole history of — I saw the original three when I was a bit too young to really ‘get it’, and have long meant to revisit them. Similar could be said of an otherwise very different film, The Usual Suspects, which popped up on Amazon — although I recently imported the US 4K release for that very reason. Still, it’s about the only noteworthy thing appearing on Prime this month.

Talking of stuff I’ve bought and not got round to… well, that’s the story of my Blu-ray collection, really. Now that I look at the list, a lot of it strikes me as horror or horror-adjacent, so perhaps it was best saved for October anywhere. I’m talking the likes of new 4K releases for Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, It Follows, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and British folk horror classic The Wicker Man; the BFI releasing Ken Russell’s Gothic; and a package of sale purchases from Severin including 4K releases of Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, plus regular Blu-rays of bizarre-sounding sequel Nosferatu in Venice, giallo The Fourth Victim, and giallo miniseries Private Crimes.

It wasn’t all October-appropriate fare dropping through my letterbox last month, though. There were animated superheroes thanks to 4K releases of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (which I need to precede with a long-overdue play of my imported 3D copy of the first film); film noir, both widely acclaimed (Eureka’s 4K release of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil) and deep cuts (Arrow’s third volume of Four Film Noir Classics, featuring Calcutta, Ride the Pink Horse, Outside the Law, and The Female Animal). There were sundry others, too: I finally picked up Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings in 3D (I quite liked it when I first watched it, and it was actually shot in 3D, so has long been on my “one day” list), and the BFI were finally able to release Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (I seem to remember they had it on the schedule years ago and had to cancel it?) And as if that wasn’t enough, my replacement disc for Vinegar Syndrome’s Showgirls 4K finally arrived as well.

So, which of these delights will end up qualifying for my Challenge as September’s Failure? Your guess is as good as mine. But despite all the money sunk on discs, I wouldn’t be surprised if the streaming cute dog film won out…

July’s Failures

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Typically this column begins with the month’s biggest cinema releases — and, this particular month, we’ve seen some of the biggest of the entire year. But, as any of my Twitter X followers may’ve seen — not to mention readers of yesterday’s monthly review — I actually went to the cinema this month, and so I’m going to begin with… some of the month’s biggest cinema releases, because I didn’t see all of them.

Indeed, I didn’t see the biggest of all, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. I considered doing the “Barbenheimer” double-bill — or even spreading it across a couple of days — but, honestly, the cinema ain’t cheap, and Barbie was pretty fully booked. I’m not forking out £12.50 for subpar seats. Also, going to see Barbie as a single mid-30s bloke… I dunno, thought it might look a bit weird… But of course I’ll catch it on streaming (or, if it lingers in cinemas, as it looks it might, maybe I’ll catch it at a quieter screening eventually).

Aside from that (and the films I did see), there’s been a surprisingly strong showing for Pixar’s latest, Elemental. A Pixar film being a box office hit wouldn’t have been a shocker not so long ago, but Disney have done such a good job of training audiences to just wait for the Disney+ debut, it has been a bit of a surprise; especially as the trailers made Elemental look a bit, well, rubbish. I’m afraid the training has worked on me, though, as this is one I’ll wait for. (In fairness, I think the only Pixar films I’ve ever seen on the big screen are three of the four Toy Storys and WALL-E.) I believe horror Insidious: The Red Door also did well, as horror movies are wont to do — they don’t cost much to make and always have a ready fanbase. I think that’s the fifth in the series, of which I’ve seen none, so I won’t be racing to catch the new one. Also debuting right at the end of the month was the seventh theatrical Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Apparently it’s rather good. I’m sure I’ll watch it someday.

With so many big-name titles tempting people out of their homes, it seems like streamers decided not to really bother this month. I mean, the best Amazon Prime Video had to offer was Prisoner’s Daughter, a film that premiered at TIFF almost a whole year ago, and — despite the relative star power of actors Brian Cox and Kate Beckinsale, and director Catherine Hardwicke — seems to have mostly poor reviews (43% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not that I like to rely on RT, but it’s an indicator, isn’t it?) I certainly didn’t bother adding it to my watchlist. Over on Netflix, there was the even-more-poorly-received crime comedy The Out-Laws (20% on RT), starring Pierce “I’ll agree to anything at this point” Brosnan and… some guy from Pitch Perfect, I think? Also They Cloned Tyrone, which has gone down considerably better (94% on RT, plus a 100% audience score), but has been overshadowed by debuting at the same time as so many headline-worthy theatrical bows. Oh, and Apple TV+ had The Beanie Bubble, which, for some reason, I just can’t muster any ounce of care about. I can’t even be bothered to look it up on Rotten Tomatoes. (Oh, alright, now I have — it’s got 51%.)

Noteworthy catalogue titles were thin on the ground, too. Netflix offered How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which looks interesting, and they tried to sell me on Hidden Strike, an actioner starring Jackie Chan and John Cena that I’d never heard of, despite it supposedly coming out back in 2021. Well, it’s certainly… something I might bung on some day if I’m feeling undemanding. Other than that, there was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, primarily of note to me because it reminded me I imported the 3D Blu-ray from Australia and never got round to watching it; and, relatedly, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which I also bought on disc (4K this time) and haven’t watched yet. Plus, Paycheck, the John Woo sci-fi-actioner starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman based on a Philip K Dick story, which I’ve ignored for 20 years because it was meant to be shit. But John Woo + Philip K Dick? Maybe the time has come to give it a chance…

The thing I found most noteworthy on Disney+ is that they’ve continued to remove titles, including kid-friendly sci-fi adventure Crater, something like only six weeks after it premiered. Naturally, I’ve now pirated it. Over on MUBI, there’s a rare chance to see one of the films that I’ve still not seen (because it’s rarely available) from my 2007 “50 Unseen” list, Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime added a bunch of stuff that has either filled out my watchlist or reminded me I own a disc I should’ve watched by now, but nothing that really merits particular comment… except perhaps The Condemned, the WWE-produced riff on Battle Royale, which I enjoyed so much when I first watched it (13 years ago) that I bought the Blu-ray; but I’ve never got round to revisiting it and, seeing it added to Prime, I realised I no longer feel any strong need to… other than that I paid for the disc so damn well ought to watch it. Well, maybe I really should — maybe it’ll surprise me as much on a rewatch as it did first time round.

More worthy of note from Amazon was their Prime Day sale, which saw a bunch of recent (and older) movies offered for rental at cut prices — and so, I actually rented a movie for the first time in ages. I used to do it all the time, partly because Amazon used to hand out a steady stream of £1 vouchers that I could use on them; but also because it was a relatively cost-effective way to watch a new film between its disc release and subscription-streaming debut. Now, all those windows are shortened and streaming subscriptions cost more than ever, so paying to rent seems less pressing. Not to mention that I’m failing to keep up with stuff I’m prepared to buy on disc, so of course I’m not paying extra to spend time on stuff I’m not prepared to buy outright. Anyway, the films that tempted me to part with my hard-earned £1.99-each were Tár, Cocaine Bear, and 65. They all expire in the next couple of weeks, so should (hopefully) definitely feature in August’s viewing. Films also in the offer that I considered but ultimately didn’t go for included Plane, The Quiet Girl, Michael Flatley’s Blackbird (it’s meant to be 100% awful, but the temptation to see how bad is strong), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (fortunately I spotted its (at the time, forthcoming) Netflix availability), Magic Mike’s Last Dance (but I’ve still not seen the first two), and, of course, a bunch of stuff I already own on disc but haven’t watched yet. Tsk.

Talking of “stuff I already own on disc but haven’t watched yet”, we reach that inevitable stage of this column. My “most unwatched” thing this month was Arrow’s 4K UHD release of Bruce Lee at Golden Harvest. I say “most unwatched” because this is a collection of films I’ve owned on DVD (in a box set from Hong Kong Legends), Blu-ray (in the Criterion set released a couple of years ago), and now on 4K, and I’ve not actually seen any of them. More fool me, really, both for not having seen such renowned action classics, and for forking out for them so many times over. (In fairness, when I bought the Criterion set I had no idea such a release from Arrow would be forthcoming, and it’s far from the only thing I’ve upgraded from DVD to HD sight-unseen. That said, I could’ve just not bought the Arrow set… but it’s so thorough (in terms of alternate cuts and special features), and so nicely presented, that I couldn’t resist.)

Those weren’t the only 4K upgrades from Arrow, though, as I finally caved and bought their 4K editions of Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o’ Nine Tails. Both have lingered in sales almost since they were released — I think Arrow put out the 4K editions too soon after the regular BDs, and didn’t add anything new beyond the higher-res film transfer; and as the 2K discs had used the same restorations (I believe), there was even less reason to upgrade. Indeed, I’d been planning not to myself, but the combination of sale pricing and having a full set of Arrow’s Argento releases in 4K swayed me.

My only other 4K acquisition this month was also my only brand-new title, Scream VI. Having enjoyed Scream (i.e. the one they should’ve called 5cream), I’m quite looking forward to that. I’m even more looking forward to Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (the trailer was fun and reviews & audience reactions sounded positive), and it came to disc here on the 31st, but as my copy only turned up today, it’s not really a failure for July. (What are the odds I don’t get round to it before September and so it is a failure next month? Time will tell.)

Of course, there were plenty of new releases of older titles to fill my ever-decreasing shelf space. (That’s a joke — my shelf space is long gone; newer purchases go on piles of piles.) Those really split down to two labels: Radiance, who released their first box set, Cosa Nostra, featuring a trio of Italian crime films directed by Damiano Damiani and starring Franco Nero; plus François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black and Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Graveyard. (The latter two actually came out back in May, but I’d ordered them with the box set for postage reasons so had to wait ’til June — which was fine, because obviously I don’t actually get round to watching this stuff.) The other label were Eureka (of course it was), who released live-action manga adaptation Golgo 13 and crime two-parter Rich and Famous / Tragic Hero.

These are all titles that sound great and exciting to me, as with most of my purchases every month, but will that actually translate into viewings? I think we all know the answer to that.