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?