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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 20th Monthly Review of May 2026

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



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

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


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



The 132nd Monthly Arbitrary Awards

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

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


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

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

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.