Tag Archives: May

May’s Failures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Finally Deadly Reckoned Monthly Review of May 2025

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Has Tom Cruise reckoned his final impossible mission? Time will tell. I sort of hope not, even if it might be time to change up how they make those movies to bring a little more focus back to story and character instead of just extravagant stunt sequences.

They are really, really good stunt sequences, though…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#41 How to Train Your Dragon 3D (2010) — Rewatch #4
#42 Trancers (1984) — Failure #5
#43 I Saw the TV Glow (2024) — 50 Unseen #4
#44 Illustrious Corpses (1976) — Genre #3
#45 Spartacus (1960) — WDYMYHS #5
#46 Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — Rewatch #5
#47 Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) — New Film #5
#48 The Graduate (1967) — Blindspot #5
#49 Funeral in Berlin (1966) — Series Progression #7
#50 Backfire! (1962) — Series Progression #8


  • I watched 10 feature films I’d never seen before in May.
  • Eight of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with two rewatches.
  • I finished March a whole month ahead, April one film behind being a month ahead, and for May… I’m a month and one film ahead! The end of June might seem like it’s halfway through the year, but it isn’t in terms of days — so, the target date for #50 is actually a couple of days into July.
  • This “month ahead” business will inevitably slow down at some point — not just because of my usual tardiness, but because some films are ‘locked’ to certain months. There are five categories limited in that way, which means the last point I can still be “a month ahead” is the end of September. But that’s something to aim for, eh?
  • This month’s Blindspot film was only the third movie to take over $100 million at the US box office, The Graduate. (Surprising fact, huh?)
  • This month’s WDYMYHS film was Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus.
  • It’s not much of a Stanley Kubrick film (in the sense that, while he did direct it, he later disowned it), but Spartacus is the first Stanley Kubrick film I’ve watched since 2022. I went through a period (about a decade ago now) where I was watching an unseen Kubrick every year. Although that regularity has tailed off, I now have only two of his features left to see (Fear and Desire and Lolita). I own both, so perhaps I’ll try to complete the set sometime soon.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched The Graduate, Illustrious Corpses, and Trancers.



The 120th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
I’m not coming across many five-star films this year (in fact, the total so far might be none), but a couple have come very close, and I Saw the TV Glow is one of those. It’s hard to describe what it is without seeing it, though I saw someone say it’s the 2020s answer to Donnie Darko and that feels very on point.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
There have been numerous screen adaptations of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and I’ve seen a few of them now. 1989’s Ten Little Indians is probably the worst, although I didn’t dislike it as much as its poor reputation would suggest. That said, it’s only worth watching for people who have exhausted other, better Christie adaptations.


Halfway through the year. I mean, not for me — I’ve already done that. But for, y’know, time.

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…

The Thin Monthly Review of May 2024

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A year after I started a rewatch of the Thin Man films by bingeing half of them, I finally got round to the other half — hence the title of this monthly review; because, while it’s by no means a spectacular month, it’s not an especially thin one either.

That said, movie watching still continues to be sidelined by my current obsession: Critical Role. After last month’s solid 48 hours of viewing, my pace dipped slightly to 43½ hours — though that shortfall can be entirely explained by my time not being wholly my own for the last week of the month. The way things are going, maybe I should rechristen the blog “100 Episodes of Critical Role in a Year”. (And it was only after drafting that sentence in my mind and drafting it again on screen that I remembered this site isn’t actually called “100 Films in a Year” anymore. Ho hum.)



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#33 Strays (2023) — Failure #5
#34 The Mystery of Chess Boxing (1979) — Genre #4
#35 Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023) — 50 Unseen #7
#36 The Menu (2022) — 50 Unseen #8
#37 And Life Goes On (1992) — Series Progression #4
#38 Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) — Rewatch #4
#39 The Thin Man Goes Home (1945) — Rewatch #5
#40 Song of the Thin Man (1947) — Series Progression #5
#41 October Moth (1960) — Series Progression #6
#42 Murder and Cocktails (2024) — New Film #5


  • I watched 10 feature films I’d never seen before in May.
  • Seven of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with three rewatches.
  • That means my Challenge is back on target, after being slightly behind for the last two months. In fact, it’s ever so slightly ahead (by a grand total of one film), which is nice.
  • It also means I’ve hit my ten new films minimum target for every month in 2024 so far, equalling my annual total for each of 2022 and 2023. I managed ten months in 2021 — hopefully it’ll be all twelve this year (which I last achieved in 2020).
  • And Life Goes On is the second film in Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, after watching the first for Blindspot last month. It’s also known as Life and Nothing More…, which seems to be a more accurate translation of the original Persian title, but the Criterion BD uses And Life Goes On, and as that’s the film’s primary release method in the UK and US nowadays, I feel like that’s the title I should go with, whatever the rest of the internet wants to pretend.
  • As I mentioned in the introduction, I finally finished the Thin Man series again, the first half of which I watched at the end of last May — neat, but I didn’t realise it had been so long. This trio could qualify as either Rewatches or Series Progression; as I was behind on the former, that’s where I counted two of them, with the series’ final film getting the latter category to its halfway point.
  • It feels a little like cheating to count October Moth as “series progression” for the Edgar Wallace Mysteries, because it wasn’t really an Edgar Wallace Mystery: it was one of seven other films bundled with those films for TV sales. But it’s included in the DVD set (albeit as a special feature), and I watched it as “the next film in the Edgar Wallace Mysteries box set”, so I think that’s qualification enough. Just about.
  • Despite all those successes, I didn’t watch either a Blindspot or WDYMYHS film this month. Well, it wouldn’t truly feel like my 100 Films Challenge if I didn’t have something that needed catching up.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched Strays.



The 108th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
I’d heard good things and so been looking forward to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves anyway, but obviously it particularly aligns with my other interests right now. It may not be the outright ‘best’ movie I watched this month, but it’s a massively fun action-adventure.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Almost like the antithesis of Honor Among Thieves, the ’80s TV movie Mazes and Monsters is notorious for two reasons: starring a pre-fame Tom Hanks, and being a ludicrous ‘Satanic Panic’-motivated riff on Dungeons & Dragons, which at the time was a fairly new game that reactionary oldies were, well, reactionary about. The film itself doesn’t manage to transcend that drawback — it starts out more-or-less alright, but ends up just silly.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
A random bunch of reviews of films I watched years ago clearly weren’t of particular interest to readers, because May’s winner was April’s failures.



Every review posted this month, including new titles and the Archive 5


2024’s halfway point approaches.

May’s Failures

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Perhaps the main failure-related discussion point this month is the announcement that Disney+ would be removing dozens of films and series. Not stuff they’d licensed where the terms had run out, or old content that they felt wasn’t of interest to modern audiences or something, but stuff that had been made for Disney+; “originals” and “exclusives” that weren’t available anywhere else — not physical media; not on other streamers; not to buy or rent. (The exception, of course, is that you can pirate them. Or some of them, anyway — there’s bound to be something missing, because piracy, in my experience, is not 100% all-encompassing.) This is relevant to “failure”s for two reasons: one, because I haven’t seen most/all of this stuff, and there are some things in there that I did want to catch, so they’re pertinent to May’s failures. They include The Princess, Artemis Fowl, Rosaline, the series remake of The Right Stuff, and the Willow sequel series. (There are various articles reporting on the full list of removals. Here’s one, for example.)

Secondly, and more importantly, it’s a failure on Disney’s part. They’re risking these modern productions becoming “lost media”, a phenomenon we all thought had been left behind decades ago, and which streaming had promised to eradicate entirely. Instead, the business models of streaming have made it all the more possible again. Sure, maybe there’s stuff in there that isn’t “worth” saving — that no one’s watching; that the people who did watch it didn’t enjoy; that no one really wants to see again, or in future — but that’s almost beside the point, because it doesn’t apply to everything. And what about rediscoveries? People can’t “rediscover” stuff that isn’t available. Not everything that deserves to be a success is a hit right out of the box.

Anyway, mini-rant over. If you want more discussion and criticism, there’s plenty of it out there, because no one apart from Disney’s management and accountants thinks this is a good idea. (Indeed, some removal choices have been so criticised that Disney have already walked them back, like the documentary about Howard Ashman. I imagine that’s going to be an isolated incident, though. I mean, if Bryan Cranston speaking out about the removal of an Oscar-nominated movie can’t save it, what can?)

Back to my usual starting place, then: the big screen. Oh look, it’s Disney again, because two of this month’s releases were the latest instalment in the MCU, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and the latest live-action remake of an animated classic, The Little Mermaid. I’m quite looking forward to the former (I’ve heard good things, and I mostly enjoyed the previous two outings), but I feel like I’m under-equipped to actually watch it. The Guardians have always been off more in their own corner of the universe than other MCU properties, but I presume I need to see Thor: Love and Thunder to find out what happened regarding Thor joining the Guardians at the end of the last Avengers team-up; and there’s also the Holiday Special on Disney+ (well, I presume it’s still on Disney+ — I can’t imagine they’re going to start wiping MCU content), which, seeing as it’s also by the film trilogy’s writer-director, James Gunn, I’m assuming is relevant to Vol. 3 to at least some degree. So, that’s kicked down the road a little bit, then. As for The Little Mermaid, I expect I’ll catch it at some point, but then I haven’t even got round to the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast yet, so who knows when.

Other big screen bows in May included the first half (or possibly the first third) of the finale to the Fast & Furious series, Fast X; the latest works from directors Ari Aster (Beau Is Afraid) and Robert Rodriguez (Hypnotic); and well-reviewed fun-looking Scandi actioner Sisu. Nothing there to tempt me out of the house, even if several will be high on my “must make an effort to get round to” list when they eventually hit streaming/disc.

As for stuff that’s already available to stream, Netflix’s main premiere this month was J-Lo actioner The Mother, while Amazon Prime had Ben Affleck’s Air make a speedy transition from its cinema release (well, that depends how you look at it: as an Amazon Studios film, is it quick to streaming, or lucky to have had any theatrical release?) In terms of true direct-to-streaming titles, the best on offer at Disney+ was kid-friendly space adventure Crater, while Apple TV+ had documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. As someone who grew up watching and loving the Back to the Future films, I really must make time for the latter.

Arguably, the back catalogue additions were more significant across all the streamers this month. Netflix debuted all eight Harry Potter films, and they promptly flooded the streamer’s top ten movies. They also added the first two Fantastic Beasts movies, which did not factor. None of those really count as “failures” — I own them all on disc anyway, and whenever my most recent rewatch was is recent enough for now — but they were a noteworthy addition to the catalogue, nonetheless. Whole cinematic series were cropping up elsewhere, too, with the complete Fast Saga (so far) on Sky Cinema (that I do want to rewatch at some point, probably after it’s all done) and the Indiana Jones tetralogy on Disney+ (I only rewatched them recently (summer 2021, so two years ago, but that’s very recent in my perception of time vis-à-vis film viewing), but then I immediately bought the 4K set and haven’t watched that yet, so rewatching them again is definitely on my radar). There were individual films of significance, too, with Amazon claiming Oscar winner The Whale as an exclusive, and the latest-but-one Marvel movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, landing on Disney+ already (personally, I’ll wait ’til a 3D version pops up somewhere online). On a more niche scale, documentary Lynch/Oz is only now getting a theatrical release this weekend in the States, but has already been on TV here, and thus streamed on Channel 4 (as Channel 4’s streaming service — previously All 4, and before that 4oD — is now known).

As ever, there was piles and piles of other stuff added to all the streamers that bulked out my watchlists, but I’m ever-hesitant to list them all here. That said, some more recent releases included Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, Freaky, The Forever Purge, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and M. Night Shyamalan’s Old on Netflix; Malignant, Reminiscence, and The Suicide Squad on Amazon Prime; Rye Lane on Disney+; and Supernova on iPlayer. That’s no to mention even older titles that I want to see (like A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies on MUBI — although, at over three-and-a-half-hours long, I doubt I’m going to make time for it), nor all the stuff I’ve actually seen but have failed to review (like Confess, Fletch on Sky Cinema (highly recommend that, by-the-way), or Baby Done on iPlayer; or even my favourite film I saw for the first time in 2020, Do the Right Thing, also on iPlayer).

The only thing sadder than a film I’ve watched but not reviewed is a Blu-ray I’ve bought and not watched — and, as ever, there are masses of those to list this month. Where to begin? How about 4K discs of new titles, like Creed III, Knock at the Cabin, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (imported from the US, because we’ve not been treated to a 4K disc over here). Then there’s the 4K bows of older titles — for once, all things I’ve already seen rather than semi-random blind buys: Dragonslayer (another import); the 1970s pair of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers; and a snazzy four-disc edition of Brotherhood of the Wolf, a film I haven’t seen for about 20 years and have been meaning to revisit for a while, finally (from a UK perspective) available in its Director’s Cut form and a good-looking 4K restoration.

Talking of 4K, David Lynch’s shot-on-video Inland Empire was remastered in 4K (using AI, I believe) for its latest releases, but I guess everyone decided the 4K version didn’t look all that, because it’s only made it to regular Blu-ray via Criterion in the US (the version I bought) and StudioCanal in the UK (a release announced after I’d ordered the Criterion disc, but each release has different special features and I think I have all the UK ones on the original DVD release, so I’m just hanging onto that). As usual, these US imports I’ve mentioned were part of a big bundle I ordered, which also included Criterion’s editions of Arsenic and Old Lace and Festen, aka The Celebration; a giallo, All the Colours of the Dark, and a giallo documentary, All the Colours of Giallo; the sequel to Searching, Missing; a drama about the creation of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo Macbeth”, Voodoo Macbeth; and the so-called “Authentic Cut” of Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt, now titled B’twixt Now and Sunrise (it’s not meant to be very good, I know, but it’s intriguing and was fairly cheap).

I say I only order US titles in bulk batches like that, but occasionally there are other ways. For example, I simply ordered Leda from Amazon. You’d be forgiven for not having heard of it — I only have because it’s been released in 3D (a rarity nowadays) and I spotted it while going through forthcoming 3D titles on Blu-ray.com. Then there was GoldenEra, the well-reviewed documentary about the GoldenEye N64 game, which I bought via eBay to get the sold-out slipcase (the regular cover looks like an N64 cartridge; the slipcase looks like an N64 box. Such neat packaging made it worth the extra expense to me). Finally, So This Is Paris is technically a US release, but I backed it on Kickstarter so got my copy that way.

Most of my UK purchases this month were new releases of older films. My second batch of titles from new label Radiance turned up, including French road trip movie Fill ’er Up with Super, Scandi thriller The Man on the Roof, psychological thriller She Dies Tomorrow, and Italian murder mystery The Sunday Woman. I finally got round to buying Arrow’s Four Film Noir Classics Vol. 2, which was released some five-and-a-half years after the unnumbered “Vol. 1”, just in time for them to announce a Vol. 3, so now I’ll need to set aside some cash for that too. Not that I’m really complaining — the more film noir the merrier.

Rounding out the month, more of my usual blind buys — basically, if Eureka or 88 Films put out a Hong Kong actioner, I’m there, and so I picked up the former’s Burning Paradise and the latter’s God of Gamblers. It’s the same with Eureka and silent cinema, though I’m not always on the ball — for example, I finally got round to buying their double-bill of early John Ford Westerns, Straight Shooting & Hell Bent, because it was going out of print. Nothing like scarcity to drive purchases.

Talking of scarcity, a quick concluding lament for Network. Rarely mentioned here because they primarily specialised in old TV — though they also released plenty of old movies, and have featured here thanks to that on several occasions — they were one of the all-time great physical media labels, filling a niche in the market with top-quality releases. They always seemed to be doing so well — releasing so many titles; their site crashing during sales periods; and so on — that it came as a shock to hear they’d gone into liquidation. But more than a shock, it was a sadness. It’s hard to imagine we’ll see their like again, and so that’s a whole area of media cut off from distribution on physical media — or probably at all, because who’s going to put that kind of stuff on streaming? They’ll be sorely missed.

The Eurovisual Monthly Review of May 2023

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Last time, I finally managed my first 10+ month of 2023. (For the uninitiated, that’s a month where I watched 10 or more films I’d never seen before. Yeah, small fry compared to those people who watch 300 or 500 or 1,000 films a year, but that’s their problem.) Considering I used to manage 10+ months on the regular (from 2014 to 2019, I went five whole years — 60 straight months — without dropping below that goal), I was hoping April would mark a turn in fortunes for 2023.

That was not to be the case. If anything, the opposite has come true. Life has been busy of late — I haven’t posted a review since February for a reason — but I’d managed to keep it from impacting too much on my actual viewing. May was when that bastion fell. I watched my first film of the month, a rewatch (see #34 below) on the 1st. I watched my first new film on the 8th. And then I didn’t watch another until the 25th. I did give over an entire week to Eurovision — normally I only watch the final, but, as it was in the UK this year, I also watched both the semis and a bunch of related documentaries that were on — but that still leaves three-and-a-bit other weeks. Well, like I said: Life.

You can read about my final tallies below, but I’ll just say this: in terms of new films watched, it was my worst month in over 14 years; and it ties (with two others) for my second worst month in the 16-and-a-half-year history of this blog, beaten only by the infamous zero of July 2009.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#34 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — Extended Edition (2003/2004) — Series Progression #6
#35 The Shiver of the Vampires (1971) — Failures #5
#36 The Thin Man (1934) — Rewatch #5
#37 After the Thin Man (1936) — Series Progression #7
#38 Another Thin Man (1939) — Series Progression #8


  • I watched just two feature films I’d never seen before in May.
  • I mentioned in my introduction that only two other months have ever had tallies so low. They were March 2008 and February 2009.
  • Only one of those films counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, but I also managed four qualifying rewatches.
  • That means I reach #38 on my Challenge (as you can see above). That’s slightly behind where I should ideally be at the end of May. I’ve ended every previous month this year on target; compared to that, being three films behind doesn’t look so good. But it’s also only three behind — that’s not too many to catch up across the remaining seven months of the year.
  • It does terrible things to my averages, though: the average for 2023 to date drops from 9.0 to 7.6; the average for May drops from 15.8 to 14.9; and the rolling average for the last 12 months drops from 8.6 to 8.2. Okay, that last one isn’t so extreme, though it only goes to show my viewing has been low in general over the past year.
  • No Blindspot or WDYMYHS films this month, which leaves me two behind on each category. Oh dear. I’m clinging on to the fact there’s still seven months in which to catch up…
  • The one thing I did have success with this month was a rewatch of The Thin Man series, getting through half of them in one weekend. Not sure when I’ll finish the other three, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn up as part of my Challenge before 2023 is over.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched The Shiver of the Vampires.



The 96th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Just two films to choose from this month, and I rated them both 3.5 stars on Letterboxd. Oh dear. They were similar in other ways, too: both are about vampires; and I made an effort to watch them both to help me decide about future Blu-ray purchases. I’ll give the edge to Jean Rollin’s The Shiver of the Vampires, because it was enough to convince me to keep buying Indicator’s 4K issues of his work.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
By default, then, my least favourite film was the only other newbie I watched this month: Hong Kong action-comedy Mr. Vampire. Tonally very different to Shiver, but another vampire-related film I was so-so on that, ultimately, did about enough to convince me to spend more on a further release — in this case, Eureka’s box set of the sequels. That said, the set is out now and I haven’t actually ordered it yet, which was about the only factor deciding which way round the two film placed. Hardly seems fair.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
Only two films, and only two posts in May, too. Not at all related, just a coincidence. And so, once again, this category is next to pointless. There wasn’t a tie, though, with April’s monthly review edging out the Failures by half-a-dozen hits. Neither were anywhere near troubling the top of the overall chart, mind.


More films watched, I hope. Getting back into the review groove would be nice too, but I’ll take things one step at a time.

May’s Failures

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Ever since the pandemic, the cinema has been “back” multiple times. The latest film driving that claim is Top Gun: Maverick, the belated-in-every-sense sequel (it’s both 36 years since the original film and something like three years since this one wrapped shooting, its release delayed until well after Covid was ‘over’) that’s been garnering rave reviews from almost everyone. Obviously, I didn’t see it (it self evidently wouldn’t be topping my ‘failures’ column if I had), but maybe next month. I’m sure it rewards the big screen experience as much as everyone says.

That wasn’t the only biggie in cinemas this month though, with multiverses causing buzz aplenty between Marvel’s latest, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the UK bow of Everything Everywhere All at Once — another film we’re urged to see ASAP, and therefore on the big screen. Again, I didn’t have a chance this month, but maybe next. Other cinema releases look like small fry by comparison, even if they include a Stephen King adaptation (Firestarter) and Mark Wahlberg vehicle (Father Stu). Coming highly recommended, but limited (so far) to a single simultaneous global screening, was Andrew Dominik’s new Nick Cave documentary, This Much I Know to Be True. Hopefully it’s not one of those “you had to see it at the time” jobs and it’ll be on disc and/or streaming eventually.

Talking of streaming, the true headline-grabbers this month were new TV series, primarily Stranger Things 4 on Netflix and Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+. By comparison, original debuting films were thin on the ground. The only one I’ve got noted for Netflix is a new Ghost in the Shell animation, but it’s not a true new film because it’s one of those “cut down a season of TV into a feature” ones — full title Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 Sustainable War — which popped up a couple of weeks before a new season of the show itself. I’ve never got round to watching the original incarnation of SAC, never mind the less well regarded (as far as I’m aware) 2045-set revival. Amazon Prime, meanwhile, offered up a Chris Pine vehicle, The Contractor, and a Zac Efron one too, Gold. Neither seem particularly noteworthy.

As far as new-to-subscribers additions go, Netflix arguably had the biggest hitter with Bollywood crossover hit RRR — even if it wasn’t in the original language (exclusivity for that has been nabbed by another streamer) and, I read, not in the original aspect ratio. It’s enough to put you off watching it… were it not for the piles of praise I’ve seen it attract. Naturally, being a product of the Indian film industry, it’s really long, so I just need to find the time for it. The next most noteworthy title on my list is another international hit, two-time Oscar and two-time BAFTA nominee The Worst Person in the World, which is on MUBI. Once upon a time Sky Cinema were king of this category — the whole reason it exists, even — but this month the best they could do was Dear Evan Hansen. Oh dear. Meanwhile, Amazon added C’mon C’mon, which seemed to garner a lot of praise on Letterboxd at one point last year, but that didn’t materialise into much during award season. It didn’t even make my 50 Unseen list for last year in the end. Still, it goes on the watchlist now.

Indeed, my watchlists on all these services were padded out with piles of catalogue additions; so many it would be far too dull to list them all, especially as sometimes it’s just a film jumping from one service to another (looking at you, Ammonite and Chaos Walking). There also seemed to be a particularly large number of things I’ve been meaning to watch on disc but haven’t, which always elicits mixed feelings — a blend of “well why did I bother buying it then” and “I really should’ve watched that by now”. It was, in fact, All 4 that were worst for the latter this month, airing several titles I’ve owned on disc for ages, including The Handmaiden, The Kid Who Would Be King, and Zhang Yimou’s Shadow.

Talking of stuff I own on disc, let’s just move onto that, because I certainly bought more than enough stuff this month. No new-new releases (i.e. recent films new to disc) this month. I’m not sure if that’s because there’s been a dearth of them or because none have interested me. There have been plenty of new editions of catalogue titles, though, mainly foreign genre titles thanks to the boutique labels: martial arts movies like Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Hero, and Human Lanterns from 88 Films; a pair of poliziotteschi from director Sergio Sollima, Violent City and Revolver (coincidentally released in the UK on the same date by two different labels. Maybe the rights just became available or something, because there certainly wasn’t any apparent cross-promotion effort); and a whole box set of neo-noir titles from Australia’s Imprint label, titled After Dark: Neo-Noir Cinema Collection One. “Collection One”? Promises, promises.

The latter I ordered as part of a bundle of all of Imprint’s releases this month, which also included Paul Greengrass’s superb drama about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Bloody Sunday (it featured on my 100 Favourites list back in 2016); political thriller The Contender (never seen it, but it was more-or-less free by ordering the discounted bundle rather than just the other three titles, and I do like a political thriller); and Walter Hill’s The Warriors, a two-disc edition featuring the original theatrical cut on disc for, I believe, the first time. It’s the kind of release I’ve wanted for that film ever since I first saw it in 2018, so I was thrilled to get my hands on it. Just hope we don’t get someone like Arrow doing an even-more-bells-and-whistles version for the northern hemisphere anytime soon…

Talking of imports and genres, I picked up Arrow’s US-only releases of The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter and Come Drink with Me, which cost more than their UK counterparts but also boast considerably more special features. While I was getting those, I bulked up my order with a punt on the new 4K release of Heavy Metal, which comes bundled with its less-remembered sequel, Heavy Metal 2000; plus the latest classic 3D title to make it to disc, Treasure of the Four Crowns, a film I’d never heard of, but I’m always keen to support the continued release of genuine 3D content; and also a couple of films I had seen that don’t have Blu-ray releases on this side of the pond, steampunk animation April and the Extraordinary World and Clint Eastwood’s true-crime Southern Gothic Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

And that’s not even all! There were more poliziotteschi in Free Hand for a Tough Cop (great title) and Silent Action (aka The Police Accuse: The Secret Service Kill, which sounds much cooler); a couple of things I heard recommended so picked up half on a whim, like single-take sci-fi Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and Woman at War; and a bunch of stuff that’s been lurking on my “consider buying” list for months/years and finally was on offer, like Irezumi, Over the Edge, A Silent Voice, The Spy in Black, and The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch (talking of cool titles…)

Finally for this month, the greatest frustration of all disc collecting: two re-releases of titles I already owned and hadn’t intended to re-buy but ended up caving on. First, Arrow’s 4K edition of Dario Argento’s Deep Red. I’ve largely been ignoring their 4K Argento reissues because I already bought them all on Blu-ray and, frankly, haven’t watched any of them, and the ‘only’ thing the new editions add is the 4K transfer (which isn’t always that much of an upgrade — I haven’t bothered with their 4K of Donnie Darko for that very reason). But I discovered this month that Deep Red actually added a host of bonus features, plus packaging more in line with their other Argento titles; and the screen caps do make the quality of the transfer look noticeably better, so I caved. Secondly, Eureka’s Blu-ray edition of Vampyr. I seem to remember when they released it on DVD (back in 2008) they decided the print quality wasn’t up to HD standard (although they released their first Blu-rays in 2009, so maybe I’m misremembering), but it’s since been restored; plus they’ve added new special features and a big ol’ booklet. It’s a film I had mixed/muted feelings about when I finally watched it last year, which was part of my reluctance to upgrade, but then I guess I got FOMO about a limited-edition pretty Masters of Cinema release. But hey, the film merits a revisit, and this will encourage me to do so… some day…

The Jubilatious Monthly Review of May 2022

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Of course, May had nothing to do with the jubilee (other than some precursor events), and the actual long weekend doesn’t start until tomorrow, so this post title is… not the best. But we’ll probably have forgotten it ever happened in 30 days’ time, so I’m not holding back the reference ’til June’s review.

Anyway, let’s put largely irrelevant naming issues aside and get on with last month’s viewing…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#31 The Monolith Monsters (1957) — Decades #11
#32 Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) — WDYMYHS #4
#33 Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) — New Film #5
#34 On the Town (1949) — Rewatch #5
#35 To Be or Not to Be (1942) — Blindspot #5


  • I watched seven feature films I’d never seen before in May.
  • Four of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
  • Those are less than ideal numbers — I should be at #41 by now, really. Next month marks the halfway point of the year, of course, but I’m really going to have to step things up to get to #50 by then.
  • One of the films I watched this month that didn’t count was Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It’s part of an ongoing series I’m watching — the MCU — so why doesn’t it count for Series Progression? Well, my personal rule when I count ‘series I’m in the middle of watching’ is that they’re series that have already finished, or where I’m catching up. Series where the next instalment isn’t even out yet can’t count because it doesn’t ‘exist’ yet. Sometimes, however, a new release can count, as with Encanto for Disney Classics last month, because I’m still watching older films as part of my catchup, so new releases get added to the end of the list. Does that make sense? Is it fair?
  • This month’s Blindspot film was Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi satire To Be or Not to Be.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS film was Woody Allen’s comedy-drama Hannah and Her Sisters. Regular readers may remember I needed to watch two WDYMYHS films this month to catch up. Well, I didn’t, so that goal is now bumped to next month.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched The Monolith Monsters (from Eureka’s Three Monster Tales of Sci-Fi Terror set).



The 84th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Nothing truly exceptional this month, as is perhaps given away by the fact I’m going to choose an MCU film as my favourite. Obviously Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings ticks the usual MCU boxes, but it mixes in a healthy dose of martial arts action-fantasy filmmaking — another (sub)genre I enjoy — making for an all-round entertaining MCU debut for the eponymous hero. It’s not the kind of film that’s going to convert nonbelievers, but it’s good fun.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
This is easily This Means War, the action-adventure/rom-com mashup starring Chris Pine and Tom Hardy as BFF CIA agents who both fall for Reese Witherspoon. It’s kinda adequate as a movie desperate to appeal to both male and female viewers, but kinda fails both by trying to be two different things at once and nailing neither.

Monster That Isn’t Really a Monster of the Month
I guess The Monolith Monsters was so titled to cash in on the popularity of monster movies in the ’50s, but the titular terror isn’t really a monster at all — it’s an extraterrestrial geological phenomena. On the bright side, at least that’s something a bit different.

Most Aspirational Lifestyle (for Some People) of the Month
In my review of tick, tick… BOOM! this month, I wrote that it would appeal to some people who dream of living that lifestyle. The same could absolutely be said of Frances Ha, which is about twentysomethings failing at life… but coolly, in black & white, in New York City. Well, if you only dream of failure, at least you’re less likely to be disappointed by reality, right?

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
A series of posts I started this year has been growing in popularity month on month… Well, I say that: I’m not sure its actual numbers have been going up, so much as the rest of the viewing chart has been falling away around it. Anyway, for the first time, this month’s most-viewed new post is a ‘failures’ post; namely, April’s Failures (of course). I guess people are more interested to read about what I didn’t watch than what I did. Weird.



Every review posted this month, including new titles and the Archive 5


…marks the halfway point of the year — yes, already! — so I might indulge in a few bonus statistics.

The Reopened Monthly Review of May 2021

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Cinemas are back! And in the two weeks (and a bit) since they reopened here in the UK, I’ve been… not at all. Well, I have something of an excuse: I started a new full-time job halfway through this month — on the same day cinemas were allowed to reopen, in fact — which means I can no longer go slipping off there on a quiet weekday afternoon. I shall miss that. Anyway, there’s still evenings and weekends, once I’ve finally settled into my new routine and can motivate myself to get out. Indeed, it’s also affected my viewing at home: the record-setting pace I established earlier in the year, which had slipped slightly by the end of April, has not been regained. All is not lost, however, as May 2021 still managed a couple of firsts. More on those in a minute. First, my viewing list…


#95 The Awful Truth (1937)
#96 Page Eight (2011)
#97 Carefree (1938)
#98 Baby Done (2020)
#99 An American Pickle (2020)
#100 Cinema Paradiso (1988), aka Nuovo Cinema Paradiso
#101 I Care a Lot (2020)
#102 Strange Confession (1945)
#103 Twister (1996)
#104 Spontaneous (2020)
#105 Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)
#106 Stuart Little (1999)
#107 Drop Zone (1994)
#108 The Aeronauts (2019)
#109 Good Boys (2019)
#110 Crank (2006)
#111 Official Secrets (2019)
#112 Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
#113 Defending Your Life (1991)
#114 Testament of Youth (2014)
#115 Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
Cinema Paradiso

Spontaneous

Official Secrets

.


  • I watched 21 new feature films in May.
  • Those included reaching eponymous goal, with #100 being this month’s Blindspot film (more on that in a mo). I got to it on the 5th, which ties with last year for the earliest ever… except 2020 was a leap year, meaning May 5th was the 126th day of the year then, whereas in 2021 it’s the 125th — so, in that respect, this is a new record. Hurrah!
  • I didn’t make it to my new goal of 120 films, though, so May 2020 clings on to that record for the time being.
  • May 2021 has some other achievements to its name, however. For instance, it makes 2021 the first year where I’ve watched over 20 films in each of the first five months of the year. Coincidentally, it’s also my 30th month ever with 20+ films.
  • In terms of averages, that figure surpasses the May average (previously 16.1, now 16.4), but falls just short of the rolling average of the last 12 months (previously 21.8, now 21.0 — so, er, it’s actually bang on it now), and of the average for 2021 to date (previously 23.5, now 23.0).
  • But back to achievements, because, as regular readers may remember, since July 2017 I’ve been tracking the days of the year on which I’d never watched a new film as part of this blog. When I began, I had eight still to check off. It’s taken almost four whole years, but the quest is finally complete: I watched a film on the last outstanding date, May 23rd. What did I choose to mark the auspicious occasion? Plan 9 from Outer Space. A silly film for what is, frankly, a fairly silly achievement. But it’s done now, so I can move on… to making sure I’ve seen at least two films on every date! (Not really.) (But now that I’ve mentioned it… Oh dear.)
  • This month’s Blindspot film: an appropriate choice for this year’s #100, because Cinema Paradiso is all about the love of cinema. Doubly appropriate this month, then, with them reopening.
  • Unfortunately, I watched nothing from last month’s “failures”. A double failure!



The 72nd Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
There’s a few different options this month: films I admired a lot, but would come up short of saying I loved; films I enjoyed a lot, but can certainly recognise their flaws. In the end, I’m coming down in favour of Official Secrets, if nothing else because I think more people should see it. It arguably comes up a little short to be a ‘great movie’, but it’s an important story, well told.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Sometimes you watch a “bad movie” cult classic and, even though it is technically a terrible movie, you have a great time — I’m thinking of The Room or Love on a Leash here. Theoretically, Plan 9 from Outer Space should fall into that camp. For some people, it does. But not for me — I just thought it was rubbish.

Best Recycling of a Musical Theme of the Month
Okay, the recycling wasn’t actually done by this film — this is the original. But Drop Zone features a throwaway music cue by Hans Zimmer (it plays over a minor bit of action business) that would later be repurposed to much great acclaim: it’s the main theme to Pirates of the Caribbean. That’s become a very popular bit of film music, which is in part thanks to the film being so popular, thereby widening it’s audience, but it’s a great cue in and of itself. It’s far and away the best bit of score in Drop Zone — the rest is wholly forgettable; indeed, it’d be better if they just played “the Pirates theme” over everything… which is kinda what they eventually did in Curse of the Black Pearl, so I guess Zimmer and co learnt their lesson.

Special Award for Achievement in Director’s Cut-ing
Normally when I view a variant cut of a movie — be it a Director’s Cut, an Extended Edition, or whatever — it’s not really that different to the original version; and when that’s the case, it doesn’t get a new number in my viewing (because I’m counting how many new films I’ve seen, obv). But, now and then, one of these cuts does manage to be different enough that I feel it warrants being counted as a new film. I suppose some people would always argue with that, but I feel that if you’ve added or changed enough material that the viewing experience feels different (for good or ill), then that makes the viewing more than just a rewatch. Now, some filmmakers are more prone to revised cuts than others — Ridley Scott, famously, or Peter Jackson — and I notice this when I work out which directors I’ve reviewed the most films by on this blog, because I count those different-but-not-that-different cuts as “bits”. So, for example, Ridley Scott tallies “14 and 3 bit” films; or Peter Jackson has “8 and 3 bits”. But one director has avoided “bits” with impressive regularity, and that person is Zack Snyder. Although I’ve covered extended cuts of three of his movies now (Watchmen, Batman v Superman, and Justice League), his tally has “0 bits”. When Snyder does a variant cut, he really makes it matter.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
It’s a true rarity this month: the victor was April’s monthly review! I’ve been published one of these every month for many years now, but I’m not sure one has ever topped the chart before (but I can’t be bothered to dig through 71 previous Arbies to find out right now).



My Rewatchathon continues to slip behind target, from four short at the end of April to five now. I had intended to finish the Indiana Jones series this month, and also to see Godzilla vs. Kong on the big screen when cinemas reopened, which combined would’ve left me considerably less far off target… but neither of those things happened, so here we are. Maybe next month.

#14 Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
#15 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
#16 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

A selection of things I’ve been meaning to rewatch for a very long time, here. First up, Singin’ in the Rain, a musical classic that often sits surprisingly high in polls like Sight & Sound’s — not that it’s not a great movie, but it doesn’t seem to fit with the sorts of things around it at the top end of those kinds of polls. For me, as great and lovely as the film certainly is overall, it still has the occasional minor longueur; and, sure, there are three or four or maybe even five great songs, but also a handful of minor, very forgettable ones; and I’m never a big fan of an extended ballet interlude, although this is definitely one of the better ones. But, as I said, overall it is really good — I’m focusing on the drawbacks because it was a film that I’d wondered if it should’ve been in my 100 Favourites, but I think it was right to just miss out.

As for films that did make my 100 Faves, I’ve been meaning to rewatch the Indiana Jones movies for years. I’m not entirely sure when I last saw them, but it’s been over 13 years, minimum (did I re-watch the trilogy in the run-up to Crystal Skull’s May 2008 release? Maybe (that sounds like the kind of thing I might’ve done), but I can’t remember). I even bought the Blu-ray set when it first came out, which was 8½ years ago, but I’ve never got round to playing it. Now, the series is out in 4K next week, so I thought I ought to watch my darn 1080p discs before I inevitably upgrade (I’m a hopeless case). I grew up loving the Indy films, which is perhaps why I haven’t rewatched them a lot in recent years — they’re so familiar, it’s not ‘necessary’ — but, actually watching them again after so long, it’s reminded my why I should watch them more often: they’re really great.

Also, that long gap means this is the first time I’ve seen Temple of Doom uncut: on its original release in the UK, they cut out over a minute to secure a PG certificate from the BBFC, and that shortened version persisted even until the DVD release, with the uncut version (now rated 12) only debuting on Blu-ray. Temple is the only Indy film not already covered on this site (I reviewed Crystal Skull (twice) while it was still in cinemas, and Raiders and Last Crusade were part of my 100 Favourites series in 2016), so I’ll give it the Guide To treatment sometime. In the meantime, my Letterboxd post is likely a preview of my summary and score.


For the first time in a fair old while, we begin with new releases on the big screen — though, of course, none of these were interesting enough to tempt me out. But, c’mon, Peter Rabbit 2? No thanks. As for the rest of the newest releases, things like Mortal Kombat, Spiral: From the Book of Saw, and Cruella are all movies I’ll happily watch in a few months — or maybe a few years — at home. There was also The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, which is apparently the seventh film in the Conjuring universe, something which has apparently sprung into existence without me even noticing. I don’t intend to play catchup.

Netflix continued to offer some at-home alternatives, of course, include Zack Snyder’s zombie/heist mashup Army of the Dead and Amy Adams thriller The Woman in the Window. The latter slipped down my viewing pecking order thanks to all the negative reviews, while the former, I kinda want to make time to see Snyder’s first zombie flick first. Maybe soon. Also on Netflix, Oxygen sounds up my street as a single-location sci-fi thriller, and, from the back catalogue, Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell made what I feel is a rare streaming appearance — I’ve been meaning to try to see that for years. Amazon Prime didn’t have quite the same calibre of additions, it must be said. I mean, another Liam Neeson actioner, Honest Thief — at this point I don’t even know if that’s a genuine premiere or just one I hadn’t heard of finally landing on streaming. They did add Upstream Color, though; which, like Drag Me to Hell, I’ve been waiting a long time to appear on a streamer. And now that they have, I haven’t watched them. Typical.

I’ve still got a MUBI subscription ticking over, even though I don’t really watch it — there’s a pile of stuff on there I want to see, and I keep telling myself if I don’t cancel then I might watch it eventually, but it’s all, y’know, MUBI-type stuff, so I’m not often in the mood. But additions of particular interest during May included Park Chan-wook’s Thirst and a trio of Francis Ford Coppola movies in The Outsiders, Youth Without Youth, and Tetro. And talking of things I should cancel, I still have Sky Cinema lingering from the Oscars. Like MUBI, they have a bunch of stuff I kinda want to see, although, frankly, it’s mostly lower brow — Angel Has Fallen, Scoob!, the new versions of Charlie’s Angels and The Witches, and so on. Their most recent additions haven’t been up to much, either — Riverdance: The Animated Adventure, anyone?

Over on the free streamers, something else that I’ve wanted to see for a very long time but is never available to stream: a perennial feature on the mid- to lower-end of “greatest film of all time” lists, Paris, Texas, which is currently on All 4, alongside Capernaum (which is on the IMDb Top 250) and One Cut of the Dead (which I’ve seen but really should’ve reviewed). As for iPlayer, the most interesting stuff has been films they’ve had on before that I’ve never quite got round to — Margin Call, Guys and Dolls, the 1958 version of Dunkirk, and so on.

Finally, purchases. A smaller haul than has sometimes been the case, but that’s only by relative standards: I could still name 16 films I’ve bought on disc this month but not watched yet. They include the six titles in Indicator’s third Columbia Noir set; their release of Ridley Scott’s Someone to Watch Over Me; a bunch of classic French films that were randomly cheap on Amazon: Le Corbeau, Quai des Orfevres, and Le Trou, the latter of which is on the Letterboxd Top 250; as is The Ascent, a Criterion title that I also picked up randomly cheap on Amazon. Also randomly cheap on Amazon: the highest grossing film of 2020, Chinese war flick The Eight Hundred; and cheaper than elsewhere, Arrow’s Tales from the Urban Jungle, a two-film set that I was glad to get for a bargain because I already own one of them (The Naked City, although it’s a better transfer here) and didn’t especially like the other (Brute Force, which I do owe a rewatch). Rounding out the aforementioned 16 were two new Eureka releases of Eastern actioners, from very different eras: 1972’s One-Armed Boxer (a riff on The One-Armed Swordsman, a film I loved, with the same star, Jimmy Wang Yu, also serving as writer and director); and, from 2000, Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide. (And, though technically not relevant to this section, I’d like to point out that I actually watched a couple of things I bought this month, too; namely, Defending Your Life and Zack Snyder’s Justice League.)


We’ll be halfway through the year already!

Holy Monthly Review of May 2020, Batman!

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Altogether, I watched 39 feature films this month… but that includes my Rewatchathon tally, so it’s no record breaker. Further down you can find out how that total divides up between new viewing and rewatches, but it’s pertinent here because four of those films were Batman-related. That might not sound like many, but it’s 10.3% of my viewing this month. Couple it with some unwatched Bat-purchases (see the “failures” section), and recent headlines about Justice League (the Snyder cut) and Batwoman (resigning), and it feels like the Caped Crusader has been around a lot of late — hence the post title. Makes a change from something coronavirus related, eh?


#96a DC Showcase: Jonah Hex (2010)
#97 Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)
#98 Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
#99 August 32nd on Earth (1998), aka Un 32 août sur terre
#100 Joker (2019)
#101 The Head Hunter (2018)
#102 Black Angel (1946)
#103 Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004)
#104 Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
#105 Scooby-Doo! & Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2018)
#106 Top Secret! (1984)
#107 American Animals (2018)
#108 Belladonna of Sadness (1973), aka Kanashimi no Belladonna
#109 Zero Charisma (2013)
#110 Marriage Story (2019)
#111 Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
#112 Stuber (2019)
#113 Misbehaviour (2020)
#114 Phase IV (1974)
#115 A Bug’s Life (1998)
#116 127 Hours (2010)
#117 Hotel Artemis (2018)
#118 The Goonies (1985)
#119 Maelström (2000)
#120 Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
#121 The Sky’s the Limit (1943)
#122 Philomena (2013)
#123 Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020)
#124 Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017)
#125 My Favourite Wife (1940)
#126 The Looking Glass War (1970)
#127 Fisherman’s Friends (2019)
Joker

Marriage Story

Philomena

The Looking Glass War

.


  • I watched 31 new feature films in May.
  • That makes it just my fifth ever month with over 30 films. It ties with October 2015 as my fourth highest month.
  • It flies past the May average (previously 14.8, now 16.1) and the rolling average of the last 12 months (previously 14.75, now 15.3), as well as the average for 2020 to date (previously 24.0, now 25.4).
  • This month’s other milestones include passing my eponymous goal of 100 films, which feels less of an achievement since the last time I failed it was eight years ago. However, it’s the earliest I’ve ever achieved it: I got there on 5th May, beating 2018’s 10th May.
  • I also passed my updated goal of 120 new films. Again, that’s the earliest I’ve got so far: I was there on 22nd May, beating 2018’s 29th May.
  • So it should come as no surprise that #127 is the furthest I’ve ever reached by the end of May. Next closest is, again, 2018, when I’d got to #124.
  • One thing I failed to do this month was watch a new film on the 23rd, one of the three remaining dates on which I’ve never watched a film in this blog’s lifetime (a thing I’ve been specifically working to iron out since July 2017). The other two are 5th January and 22nd December, which makes this May date feel like a real oddity. I mean, in early January I’m often so caught up in my review-of-the-year posts that I don’t watch many films; and December 22nd is a date I’m often doing Christmas stuff (family get-togethers, etc). 13 years is a long time for them both to go empty, considering 99.2% of the rest of the year has filled up over that time, but at least there are clear reasons that reoccur every year. Why May 23rd, though… I’ve not got the foggiest.
  • Attentive readers may’ve spotted two early Denis Villeneuve films amongst this month’s viewing. I’ve had copies of all of his early (i.e. pre-Prisoners) work for a number of years now, and I thought I’d finally get round to them in the run-up to Dune. Expect some more next month.
  • This month’s Blindspot film: Kenji Mizoguchi’s acclaimed fantasy drama Ugetsu Monogatari.
  • In a total about-turn from my last record-setting “failures” tally, I watched none of the ones I listed last month.



The 60th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
The more films you watch, the higher the chance more of them will be great, and so I have a few strong contenders to choose from this month. On balance, I give the gong to Belladonna of Sadness for being quite unlike anything else I can remember seeing. But any of the films whose poster I’ve pictured above (except Joker, which I have mixed feelings about) were in the running and are certainly on the long-list to make my year-end top ten.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
My most disappointing viewing experience this month was definitely My Favourite Wife, a screwball comedy starring Cary Grant that has its moments but overall made me appreciate how much skill was involved in the truly great screwball comedies — it has none of their pace or spark.

Best Joker of the Month
Look, I know Joaquin Phoenix won the Oscar ‘n’ all, but rewatching Batman ’89 reminded me just how good Jack Nicholson was in the role. I’m not saying he’s the greatest Joker ever (there’s strong competition), but I think people forget that he gave as effective and iconic an interpretation of the part as anyone else has.

Best Double-Bill of the Month
I realise this is kinda just praising my own film-choosing skills, but c’mon, Phase IV and A Bug’s Life is an amusing “talking ants” double-bill by anyone’s standards (right?)

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
For the second month in a row, and the third time this year, a film review has topped the table of new posts (that might sound like a silly observation on a film blog, but my TV columns usually do very well for hits. Indeed, taking all posts into account, 19 of May’s top 20 most-viewed posts were TV ones). The victor this month was, somewhat surprisingly, The Head Hunter — hardly a major film, nor a new release (though it was fairly new to the UK, so maybe that’s what helped). Meanwhile, the headline of this month’s TV column was Quiz, which only began airing in the US last night, so maybe that will make like Bodyguard and be a big draw next month.



It’s been about a year, so today I’ve given the directors page header image its annual(ish) update. For those who don’t know, it displays the 20 directors with the most number of films I’ve reviewed. For the past few years there’s been a tie for the last few spots, but this year it happened to work out to exactly 20, thanks in part to this month’s viewing. (Honestly, that’s a coincidence — I didn’t choose the films I watched to break the tie.)

So, what changes? Well, Stanley Kubrick, Richard Linklater, and M. Night Shyamalan all exit. David Lynch secured a place thanks to Dune (which I (re)watched last month) and the short film What Did Jack Do? (which I watched in January), while Danny Boyle did so via 127 Hours and Frankenstein (I reviewed the latter as TV rather than a film, but I’ve put it under his name on the directors page nonetheless, as I have done with some miniseries by other directors). Finally, nudging his way into the 20th spot via Intolerable Cruelty is Joel Coen, representing the Coen Brothers just as he did in credit form before they were allowed to both be named.


My Rewatchathon goal is 50 films a year, which averages out at just over four films a month — so this month I watched a double quotient’s worth, in the process passing the halfway mark a month early.

#19 The Green Hornet 3D (2011)
#20 Flash Gordon (1980)
#21 Mission: Impossible (1996)
#22 Batman (1989)
#23 Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)
#24 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
#25 The Saint (1997)
#26 The Spider Woman (1944)

As usual, the above links are to my original review (where available). Rewatch thoughts follow…

I happened to see an interview with the creative team behind a new Green Hornet comic book, and that was enough to make me decide to rewatch the film that evening. What can I say, I’m fickle and easily swayed sometimes — though, in fairness to myself, I bought it in 3D a little while back, so a rewatch has been on my mind. It looked pretty good. More thoughts on Letterboxd.

Flash Gordon was similarly provoked: I was so excited for that gorgeous 4K box set StudioCanal announced, I had to watch my current copy. It’s such deliciously campy, gaudy fun — I love it.

I last rewatched all the Mission: Impossible films in the first half of 2018, in the run up to the theatrical release of Fallout. That’s two years ago — a long time for some people, but by my timescales it feels like I’ve just watched them. But they’re fab films, and I’ve had the 4K box set waiting for a little while now (which features massive improvements to the PQ of the first two films), so… and, indeed, this one looks fantastic in 4K. The stuff in Prague, in particular, is gorgeously shot. And so many split diopter shots, some for absolutely no good reason! De Palma and/or DP Stephen H. Burum were just having fun here.

I posted a long-ish comment about Batman on Letterboxd, but I’m also intending to give it the ‘Guide To’ treatment, so more then.

I enjoyed Sherlock Holmes Faces Death slightly less than I remembered. I think that’s because, on a first viewing, it’s easily one of the series’ best to that point, whereas with hindsight there are better to come. Still, I don’t wish to damn it with faint criticism: if it’s not among the series’ very finest, it’s still a solid Holmes adventure. More on Letterboxd. And speaking of the series’ very finest, a contender for that crown is The Spider Woman. Again, more new thoughts on Letterboxd.

As for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I still think the miniseries has the edge, but the film is a really fantastic adaptation too. Shame we never got the mooted sequels. (Incidentally, the new adaptation of Rebecca I mentioned in the intro to my original review is finally due out this year, just seven years later.)

Finally, the Val Kilmer-starring reboot of The Saint. I watched this Back In The Day and remember more or less enjoying it, but I also couldn’t recall anything specific about it. That’s probably because it’s actually rubbish. It clearly wants to be GoldenEye or Mission: Impossible, but doesn’t have the skills or ingenuity to get there. It has a kind of charm if you’re nostalgic for ’90s post-Cold War action-thrillers, but that’s all. When your cool leader character’s car is provided by Volvo, you know you’re onto a loser.


For the second month in a row, cinemas remain completely closed. Perhaps the most-discussed “home premiere” title was Scoob!… but that didn’t get a UK release, so I definitely didn’t see it. In fact, I can’t think of a single other home premiere title this month — either they’ve dried up already, or what came out wasn’t significant enough to catch my attention. I did plump for a few discount rentals thanks to Amazon Prime, though, including The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Peanut Butter Falcon, and The Rhythm Section. They should all pop up in next month’s viewing.

My disc purchasing continues unabated, of course. As mentioned in the intro, I picked up a couple of Batman titles on offer: last year’s animations Hush and Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the set of Burton/Schumacher movies in 4K — I already rewatched Batman, and have Returns, Forever, and & Robin to come in the near future. Other sale pickups included more films to rewatch in 4K: A Few Good Men, Gladiator, Hellboy, and It’s a Wonderful Life; plus one I’ve never seen, American Gangster; and a couple in good ol’ 1080p, Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, and The Seven-Ups, which was recommended to me a good while ago.

But most of this month’s buying was new releases, albeit many of them catalogue titles: Second Sight’s limited editions of The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and Revenge; 101 Films’ Black Label edition of Screamers; Masters of Cinema’s release of Johnnie To’s Throw Down; Arrow’s new Krzysztof Kieślowski box set, Cinema of Conflict; and 88 Films’ new edition of Mystery Men, one of my favourite films. In terms of new-new titles, there was Mark Cousins’ new 14-hour documentary, Women Make Film, and 1917 in 4K.

The streamers were as busy with new additions as ever in May. Among Netflix’s was The Soloist, which I guess wouldn’t attract too many people’s attention, but it grabs mine because it’s on one of my ‘50 Unseen’ lists but has never seemed to be available anywhere. I’ll have to make an effort to see it before it disappears again. Also of particular note was Monos, which I remember attracting a lot of attention on Letterboxd at one point; original movie The Lovebirds, which sounds like it might make for a diverting-enough 90 minutes; and The First Purge, primarily because it means Netflix now have all The Purge movies except for the one I need to see next, The Purge: Election Year. Grr. They also gained a few titles that I’ve owned on Blu-ray for years without getting round to rewatching, like Miami Vice, Vertigo, and Waterworld, for shame.

Over on Amazon, their most recent original is The Vast of Night, which I feel like I would’ve skimmed past if I hadn’t happened to see the review on Vodzilla that piqued my interest by describing it as an “affectionate and mischievous homage to 1950s sci-fi” and “Twilight Zone-esque”. (That said, in the past couple of days it’s also popped up repeatedly on Letterboxd and other blogs, so I guess I would’ve spotted it one way or another.) In the UK we also got My Spy — I believe Amazon have the worldwide rights, but here it snuck into cinemas before lockdown so they’ve already put it up to stream, whereas I don’t think it’s been released everywhere else yet (not in the US, at least).

Catalogue additions included In the Name of the Father, which I don’t recall seeing available to stream before, but it’s on the IMDb Top 250 (at time of writing it’s 188th) so I should make the effort while I can; and even more things I own on DVD or Blu-ray but have never got round to watching, including 30 Days of Night, Cloud Atlas, Green Zone, Midnight in Paris, Monster’s Ball, and Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. Also The Limey, which finally got a Blu-ray release recently but, sadly, Lionsgate fudged it up by not including the DVD’s special features (the commentary is legendarily great). It’s available in 4K, but sadly not on Prime (which is 1080p only) or disc. Regular readers may recall I ranked it in my top ten in 2016, so I’m miffed about all this mishandling. Similarly, they added The Hateful Eight this month, which is presumably why we’ve never received Netflix’s extended miniseries cut here in the UK — they just don’t have the rights. Frustrating.

Netflix and Amazon may spoil us for choice (the ones I’ve listed are only a small selection of things I noted throughout the month), but it’s a different picture at Sky Cinema / Now TV. They may add at least one premiere every day, but few of their offerings caught my eye this month — just French submarine thriller The Wolf’s Call; ‘gator horror Crawl, which I’ve heard good things about; and Dora and the Lost City of Gold, which someone said is surprisingly good. I still doubt I’ll make time for it next month, but you never know.


Parasite finally makes it to UK disc today — I saw it back in February while it was still in cinemas (remember those?), so maybe I’ll finally review it soon.

As for likely new viewing… oh, who knows? It might be another record-challenging month, or it might not, or maybe we’ll all die because they lifted lockdown too early. Onward’s out on Monday, and The Lighthouse the week after (more belated UK disc releases), so hopefully I’ll at least get to watch those first.

Oh, and there’s the small matter of 100 Films #2000…