After a relatively disastrous May, June saw a slight turnaround in my fortunes — not a complete rehabilitation (I’m still behind target on my Challenge, and I didn’t watch ten new films either), but a definite improvement.

That hasn’t filtered through to reviews, though, as I didn’t post any for the fourth month in a row. I’m also doing a shocking job of reading other people’s work (I’ve got a browser window open with so many tabs of stuff I’ve been meaning to get round to), so sorry about that.

Anyway, here’s what I did achieve this past month…

#39 Air (2023) — New Film #5
#40 Moneyball (2011) — Rewatch #6
#41 Killer of Sheep (1978) — Blindspot #4
#42 Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021) — Failures #6
#43 In a Lonely Place (1950) — WDYMYHS #4
#44 Glass Onion (2022) — Wildcard #3
#45 Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) — Blindspot #5
#46 Au hasard Balthazar (1966) — Blindspot #6

• I watched eight feature films I’d never seen before in June.
• Six of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with two rewatches.
• That’s a total of eight (obv). Perfectly respectable under normal circumstances (8.3 films a month is the necessary average for the Challenge), but I need to do more to catch up — as noted in the introduction, I’m still behind target: I should have reached #49 by now (not #50, as you might expect. February being so short distorts the ‘halves’ of the year enough that #50’s target date falls in early July).
• Eight is also very much my current average, both for 2023 to date (to be precise, it was 7.6, now 7.7) and for the last 12 months (to be precise, it was 8.2, now 7.8, dropping because last June‘s total was 12). It’s below June’s average, though, pulling it down from 11.5 down to 11.3.
• On a broader note, my total for the year to date is below par. Coincidentally, I’m at #46 on both my Challenge and my new film count, but my all-time average for the end of June is 84. The second half of the year is going to have to outpace the first (an uncommon, but not unheard of, occurrence) if I’m to successfully reach #100 in any sense.
• I didn’t count Glass Onion towards my Challenge when I first watched it because it would’ve been a Wildcard and I was certain I’d rewatch it, so it seemed prudent to save it to count as a Rewatch. As it turns out, I rewatched it after I’d already logged a Rewatch for the month, so it goes down as a Wildcard nonetheless. Hey-ho.
• With both Blindspot and WDYMYHS beginning to fall seriously behind schedule, I decided to focus my catchup efforts on the former this month. I could’ve tried to do them both equally, but here’s the thing: Blindspot has some pretty darn long entries to be watched sometime this year (one that’s almost three-and-a-half hours long; one that’s almost four hours; and one that’s over nine hours), whereas the noirs of WDYMYHS are much more consistent (there’s a range of just 15 minutes from the shortest to the longest running times across the remaining films). Those handful of ultra-long Blindspot films were always going to pose an additional challenge, so by getting my overall progress back on track I’ve at least reset the difficulty. Conversely, the WDYMYHS films being within the same ballpark (all under two hours, too) means I can more easily attempt a similar “multiple films in a month” catchup at any point later this year (hopefully next month).
• And so, this month’s trio of Blindspot films were Charles Burnett’s key text about the Black American experience, Killer of Sheep; my first full exposure to the work of Agnès Varda, Cléo from 5 to 7; and Robert Bresson’s bleak biography of a donkey, Au hasard Balthazar.
• And this month’s sole WDYMYHS film was one of the primary inspirations for this theme in the first place, Nicholas Ray’s exceptional In a Lonely Place.
• From last month’s “failures” I watched Air and Escape Room: Tournament of Champions.

Favourite Film of the Month
I’ve already touched on this one, so I’ll just repeat myself: In a Lonely Place is a great noir; the fact I hadn’t seen it was a driving force behind making noir the theme of WDYMYHS this year, and it lived up to expectations. I’m shockingly late to the party with this one, but if you too like noir and haven’t seen it, you must.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
It’s not a bad film — and it certainly has historical significance — but Killer of Sheep wasn’t really to my taste.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
As I mentioned at the start, this is once again a two-horse race; and, as with the previous three months, there’s nothing much exciting about that. That said, the result was slightly unusual, in that the winner — my monthly review of May — attracted almost double the hits of the other new post (May’s failures). In the past they’ve been very close, or the failures have had a clear victory. Huh. Neither were anywhere near the top of the chart, mind, which this year is being dominated by my post on the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.

It’s time for another one of Tom Cruise’s impossible missions.