Tag Archives: movies

August’s Failures

Posted on by
Reply

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.

We begin this month with an oddity, for two reasons. Coyote vs. Acme was, famously, to be ditched by Warner Bros as a tax write-off, meaning it would never seen the light of day — a fate that’s befallen several films under the studio’s current management. It was eventually sold to an indie distributor instead, which means it’s actually seen the light of day — a victory for art and common sense. It’s a release we should support. And I am! That’s the other unusual thing: yes, I failed to see it this month, but I’ve booked to see it on Sunday. I think that might be the first time I’ve been able to mention a film in this column when I’ve already booked a ticket for it.

Another film I would actually have gone to see if it wasn’t prohibitively expensive to travel to the nearest place it was showing — on top of the already extortionate cost of a cinema ticket — was Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which already looked interesting and then was well reviewed to boot. Also out this month and worth mentioning (because does it really count as a failure if I’ll probably never watch it anywhere at all?) were non-park-based dinosaur flick The End of Oak Street; Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars; “The Purge but with sex (except they cut all the sex scenes)”, One Night Only; and another erotic comedy that’s inherently superior because they left the sex in, I Want Your Sex. Not often I’ll write “sex” four times in one sentence, but there you go.

I don’t know if it’s an indicator of the time of year or if their release schedule is just kinda random, but Netflix popped out a few originals this month too. I heard mixed things about drama Don’t Say Good Luck, but nothing good about sci-fi/horror The Last House, a film which answers the question “whatever happened to director Louis Leterrier?” Also just out, crime thriller The Whisper Man, with a moderately starry cast (Robert De Niro!) and another set of mediocre reviews. Apparently it’s one of their top launches of the year though, which to me just shows how low the bar is. The only other streaming premiere I’ve noted is Lena Headey action thriller Ballistic on Amazon Prime Video, another effort barely of note. I guess you could also count Disney+’s release of a new director’s cut of the second X Files movie, which now goes by the ridiculous mouthful of a title The X Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, but it’s not exactly “new”.

Subscription streaming debuts are a stronger bet, as usual, especially for Sky Cinema / NOW subscribers, where last month you’d find the likes of Hamnet and… um… I guess Song Sung Blue got some attention? Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 will appeal to certain people? Twinless and Love Me both sound interesting but I’m not sure how ‘new’ they actually are. Prime was also fairly strong in this film, in fact, with the new David Lowery film, Mother Mary, and one of this year’s Jason Statham flicks, Shelter, plus Return to Silent Hill, which is based on a video game highly acclaimed for its story, though apparently the film version is quite shit. Also Twisters, jumping there from Sky, while Hugh Grant-starring horror Heretic does an unusual jump in the other direction.

Then, from the usual mass of back catalogue additions, those particularly standing out to me this month with a sense of “oh yeah, I really should watch that sometime” included Monster’s Ball and The Tailor of Panama on Netflix; A Cure for Wellness, A Fish Called Wanda, and Freaky on Prime; and Inside Llewyn Davis, Lady Macbeth, Sing Sing, Tár, and Women Talking on iPlayer. Also now on iPlayer: Kill, an Indian action movie that made headlines when its US remake rights were bought before it was even released, and which has previously been a failure twice already (in July 2024 for its UK theatrical release and January 2025 when it was on Prime).

That’s not even mentioning films I already own on discs I’ve never played, mind, a category that this month includes Gladiator II, Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, The Third Man (which I have seen, but has been overdue a rewatch for decades), M Night Shyamalan’s Trap, and even obscure Hammer thriller 36 Hours, which I only hit 4K disc recently.

Normally I’d transition to new disc purchases off the back of that, but one other streaming title of note to me is Atlas: The Animated Movie, a project I backed on Kickstarter four years ago (time flies!) off the back of a YouTube video, which last weekend finally saw the light of day for backers, and I believe is heading to YouTube for general audiences in the next couple of weeks. It nearly snuck in to August as 2026’s #50; it might still claim that number yet, just in September.

Another brand-new release entering my collection (the only one this month, in fact) was Project Hail Mary — which, yes, I only just watched last month on Prime, but I’d already preordered it. Just the regular 4K UHD release, unfortunately, not the Steelbook with extra extras, because I missed that said extra extras were included so didn’t preorder it and now it’s sold out everywhere. Grr. I’m hoping for a last-minute restock somewhere when it actually comes out, but I don’t have much hope.

As usual nowadays, most other purchases were also 4K releases from boutique labels of older films, to one degree of “old” or another — from a 10th anniversary edition of Hunt for the Wilderpeople back to Radiance’s edition of 1970s Polish surrealist horror The Hourglass Sanatorium. In between, in chronological order, sit Second Sight’s The Name of the Rose (1986), Jackie Chan’s Armour of God (also 1986) from 88 Films, Transmission’s Vampire’s Kiss (1988), John Woo’s Once a Thief (1991) and Troy (2004) from Arrow, The Descent (2005) from StudioCanal (do they count as a boutique? Eh), and Anime Ltd completing a trio of Mamoru Hosoda box sets with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006).

Back on regular ol’ 1080p Blu-ray, there was, of course, a Eureka a title — a quartet of Hong Kong action under the banner title Reap the Whirlwind: Four Films with Angela Mao — plus more from Radiance in the shape of gritty Japanese boxing drama The Boxer and “metaphysical giallo” The Double, plus a box set of Jean-Luc Godard works, led by his eight-part Histoire(s) du cinéma and also including the Blu-ray debut of his final short, Scénarios.

Finally, from Transmission again, some television. Yes, usually outside the purview of this column, but this blog has never made a huge distinction between theatrical movies and TV movies, and the two examples of the latter bundled in Two Boxes: Televised Terror in Franco’s Spain include Antonio Mercero’s short-film-length La cabina, which I’d previously heard about multiple times on social media down the years as an under-appreciated classic. Will that be enough to actually get the disc in my player this coming month? Never say never…

The 20th Monthly Review of August 2026

Featured

Posted on by
2

Back in May, I noted how far behind target I was — at the time, 15 films. Since then, it only got worse… but this month, it finally improves!

Although not even to as far behind as I was in May, unfortunately — I’m still 17 films off where I should be. That means I have to average 13 qualifying films every month for the rest of the year to make it to #100. The last time I managed that many films in a single month was December 2024, and the last time I managed it for four months on the trot was in early 2021… but there’s still hope! A fool’s hope, maybe, but that was good enough for Gandalf.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#39 Death Trap (1962) — Series Progression #5
#40 Flavia (2026) — New Film #8
#41 Thor: Love and Thunder 3D (2022) — 50 Unseen #4
#42 The Black Phone (2021) — Wildcard #8
#43 Woman in the Dunes (1964) — WDYMYHS #3
#44 The Singing Ringing Tree (1957) — Failure #8
#45 Robot Monster 3D (1953) — Genre #3
#46 Point Break (1991) — Rewatch #3
#47 Dersu Uzala (1975) — WDYMYHS #4
#48 Dragonfly Squadron 3D (1954) — Genre #4
#49 Quatermass and the Pit (1967) — Series Progression #6


  • I watched 10 feature films I’d never seen before in August.
  • That makes it the first month to hit my minimum first-time watch goal since last November. Hooray!
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
  • I last saw that rewatch, Point Break, in 2007, the first year of this blog. The same was true of This Is Spinal Tap before I rewatched it in March. It feels fitting for the blog’s 20th year to be rewatching films from its first — maybe I should try to do that for all of this year’s rewatches? Except I’ve already messed up such a plan by not doing it for the first one (The Greatest Showman, which I previously watched in 2018), so maybe I won’t bother.
  • Quatermass and the Pit is the first Series Progression film this year that isn’t from the Edgar Wallace Mysteries series. Will they make up 50% of that category this year, or will it be more by the time I’m done? The next four months will, of course, tell.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS films were surreal Japanese drama/thriller/horror (it doesn’t often get branded a horror, but I thought it was one), Woman in the Dunes; and also kinda Japanese, but also Russian, in that it was directed by Akira Kurosawa but was funded by Russia and is in Russian and was made for Russians, Dersu Uzala.
  • No Blindspot film this month — I concentrated on getting WDYMYHS up to the same level instead.
  • From last month’s “failures” I only watched The Singing Ringing Tree.



The 135th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
My pick for film of the month came right at the end: Hammer’s third big-screen adaptation of a BBC TV Quatermass serial, Quatermass and the Pit, which is more driven by sci-fi ideas than you might expect of a ’60s flick from a studio renowned for their lurid horror.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Fitting more in the stereotypes of its era, Robot Monster is pulp ’50s SF in all the worst ways. I only watched it because it was shot in 3D, and that’s actually moderately successful — it resists the urge to poke stuff at the camera, as you’d expect from such a schlocky effort, but instead offers reasonable depth and dimensionality, and even a couple of sequences that play with ideas like showing different images to each eye.


September will need to be my most film-filled month of the year if I’m to even stand a chance of getting to #100 in December. But I’ve bought myself that extra time rather than it already feeling impossible, so that’s something.

July’s Failures

Posted on by
1

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

The biggest film on the big screen this month… was one I actually went to see, in my first cinema visit of the year. Next biggest, I guess, will end up being Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Remember the MCU? Yep, it’s still going. Less successful for Disney: the live-action remake of Moana. Oh dear what a shame. Also still going: Minions, in Minions & Monsters, plus the Evil Dead in Evil Dead Burn. Apparently quite good were The Invite and the punctuationally-baffling Nirvanna: The Band The Show The Movie, both of which I’ll definitely add to watchlists or something.

On streaming, last month’s theatrical release Masters of the Universe made it to Amazon Prime Video already, which I guess shows how well that did. Other theatrical releases from the tail end of last year / earlier this year made their streaming debuts too, with Marty Supreme and The Housemaid also on Prime, while Sky Cinema / NOW was positively flooded with them: in alphabetical order, Anaconda, Anemone (the latest film to tempt Daniel Day-Lewis out of retirement, this time because it was made by his son), Bugonia, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Lurker, Mortal Kombat II, Normal, Redux Redux, and Wicked: For Good. Over on Disney+ (which I’m not subscribed to so I don’t know why I mention it) were The Devil Wears Prada 2, which I guess counts as a legacy sequel at this point, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which I’d like to see but not enough to subscribe to a whole streamer for.

Meanwhile, Netflix had… um… back catalogue stuff? Of particular note, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, which has moved a round a few different streamers now and I’ve still not seen, so maybe this time; one of the handful of Tony Scott films I’ve never seen, The Fan; that recent-ish animated Transformers movie that I think I heard was meant to be quite good or something, Transformers One; and, as ever, a bunch of stuff I own on disc and need to get round to (re)watching, like Monsters vs Aliens, the Paul W.S. Anderson The Three Musketeers (don’t judge me, I love the musketeers; also, it’s in my beloved 3D), and Training Day (what month doesn’t see Training Day appearing on a different streamer, it feels like). Widening the net, we find more examples on Prime — Blade Runner (which I’ve not seen since its 4K disc came out), The Prestige (same), and Unforgiven (same, but even longer) — and iPlayer — Elvis, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, North by Northwest, Vertigo, and all the Spider-Mans. Messing up my neat progression of formats, iPlayer is also the latest home for romcom Anyone But You, plus the TV premiere of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (Letterboxd user’s 108th greatest film of all time, currently), and repeat appearances for Paul Thomas Anderson’s’ Licorice Pizza and Past Lives (430th on that Letterboxd list).

Okay, back to discs for all the new stuff I threw my money away on… er, I mean, added to my most venerated collection. Yeah, that. This month’s list of titles isn’t excessive, but the lists of films kind of things, thanks to finally picking up All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, Volume Two in Severin’s most recent sale — that’s 24 feature films (plus 21 shorts), to go with the 22 features (and 14 shorts) from Volume One that I still haven’t watched. Oh dear. But at least my collection’s complete! From folk horror to folk tales, this month Masters of Cinema released one box set of five German examples of the latter, titled Into the Forest: Folktales at DEFA, including a staple of ’60s and ’70s British children’s TV, The Singing Ringing Tree; and announced a second set (Beneath the Trees: Folktales at DEFA 2) for release in October.

Elsewise, it was the usual case of 4K release from boutique labels, with a pair each from Arrow — an upgrade for William Friedkin’s neo-noir To Live and Die in L.A. and my first ever purchase of Soylent Green (of course, I already know the twist. Does anyone not?) — and Hammer — the latest of their big single-film box sets, X the Unknown, plus AIP’s 1971 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. Finally, a trio for my extensive Radiance collection, covering Shohei Imamura’s “landmark satire of postwar affluence” about “a former buddhist monk turned erotic filmmaker” (sounds good, right?) The Pornographers in UHD, and in regular ol’ 1080p, more Imamura with the director’s final film, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, a “boldly sensuous and taboo-breaking love story”, plus Solo — not a Star Wars story, but Jean-Pierre Mocky writing, directing, and starring in a “profoundly satirical crime drama” that “captures the visceral feeling of disillusionment of a post-1968 French society brimming with rage at the sinister powers that be.” Fun times.

I have a Letterboxd list for said Radiance collection, which shows I own 150 features and shorts released by them… of which I’ve watched four. Well, it literally could be worse.

The 20th Monthly Review of July 2026

Posted on by
3

At one point this month, I really thought I was going to, finally, for the first time since November last year, hit my ten first-time watches minimum goal. And then life and stuff happened again and I didn’t.

The average number of Challenge-qualifying films I need to watch each month for the rest of the year now sits at 12.4. The average number I’ve watched each month so far this year is 5.4. Not promising… but 12.4 is not beyond the realms of what I’ve managed in the past… although the last time I had a month above 12 was December 2024, and the last five-month stretch that averaged above 12.4 was in 2021…

But you never know.



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#31 Wuthering Heights (2026) — New Film #3
#32 Enola Holmes 3 (2026) — New Film #4
#33 Lawless (2012) — Wildcard #6
#34 The Sheep Detectives (2026) — New Film #5
#35 Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) — Failure #7
#36 Joyride (2022) — Wildcard #7
#37 The Odyssey (2026) — New Film #6
#38 Project Hail Mary (2026) — New Film #7


  • I watched eight feature films I’d never seen before in July.
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge.
  • Five of them were films that had their UK release this year, taking my New Films category from “barely started” to “up-to-date” in one fell swoop.
  • Neither Blindspot nor WDYMYHS were progressed this month, unfortunately.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched Bodies Bodies Bodies and The Sheep Detectives.



The 134th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Sometimes I feel like so much of what I watch these days is middling — as I’ve discussed before, I don’t know if I’ve just become a harsher critic as I’ve got older (I guess gaining experience will do that to you — fewer things feel unique) or if the quality of films I’m choosing to watch has declined — but every now and then something does come along and blows me away, and this month it was Project Hail Mary.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Certified (inter)national treasure Olivia Colman shows off / labours under (deleted as applicable; I have no idea if it was good or not) an Irish accent throughout dramedy Joyride, which is… kinda fine? Some of it was funny, which rubbed a little awkwardly against when it got a bit Serious.


I’m gonna call it now: if August is the month that brings about a turnaround in my film viewing fortunes, I will be very surprised. I’m not going to do a Werner Herzog and commit to eating a shoe or something, but I’m pretty damn certain that in a month’s time I’ll be writing about a new high average that I need to hit for the rest of the year. In fact, it might finally reach the point of feeling insurmountable. We’ll see in 31 days.

June’s Failures

Posted on by
1

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

Blockbuster season (if that even still exists) is in full swing now, with the likes of Masters of the Universe, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, Toy Story 5 (apparently it’s good?!), and Supergirl filling up the multiplexes this month (or, in the case of the latter, not). None have been strong enough to tempt me out, which shouldn’t surprise any regular readers. The Odyssey ought to get me over the line (we’ll see).

As usual, this meant streaming originals were in shorter supply. Netflix managed to wheel out a few star names across “saucy rom-com” Office Romance and Julian “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante, although as the Rotten Tomatoes consensus pegs the latter as “a bloated, wildly overplayed literary fever dream whose attempts to merge past and present collapse into accidental farce”, I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to it in my queue. Prime Video’s dark comedy-thriller Over Your Dead Body seems like a better bet, even if it wasn’t spectacularly reviewed either.

But why stick to Originals when there’s better-reviewed streaming premieres fresh from the big screen? Also on Prime, comedy murder mystery The Sheep Detectives boasts 95% on Rotten Tomatoes (should anyone still care about that as a metric), there was under-seen spin-off Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is… well, it’s a good title, anyway. I liked the first two enough that I aim to watch it at some point. The same could be said about Sisu: Road to Revenge on NOW, although their other premieres this month were nothing to shout about, unusually. Meanwhile, Disney+ offered up the biggest box office successes in Pixar’s Hoppers and threequel Avatar: Fire and Ash. At the other end of the spectrum were Netflix, where I’ve not noted down anything so new, just stuff that’s already been well-played on other streamers (even though I’ve not seen them yet, obviously), like Aftersun, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Creed III, and Scoob! (which is simultaneously on Prime Video anyway). Most interesting to me was The Other Boleyn Girl, purely because it’s a leftover from 2008’s 50 Unseen that doesn’t seem to be available to stream all that often.

Further into the back catalogue, iPlayer has boasted a few titles recently that used to be exclusive to one streamer or another — things like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Queer, the Road House remake, and Sound of Metal. It can flow the other way too, with Bodies Bodies Bodies (which has been on and off iPlayer for a while) cropping up on Prime Video this month. As usual, drawing a lot of my attention were reminders for things I’ve already paid for on disc but not watched, like The Dreamers, Event Horizon, First Man, How the West Was Won, The Town, and The Walk (though that last one I own in 3D, at least, so the streaming option would never satisfy me as much).

Regardless, new purchases continue, including one I’ve already mentioned on streaming: Avatar: Fire and Ash; although, like The Walk, I own it on 3D. I could double-bill it with the previous film, The Way of Water, which I’ve still not seen either, although together they’re the length of a miniseries. Also in 3D this month, 88 Films’ long-awaited release of Jackie Chan’s Magnificent Bodyguards, from a brand-new restoration by the 3-D Film Archive. There was a lot of Chan this month, in fact, thanks also to Arrow’s Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits! set, containing six films from the early days of his Hollywood career in UHD (along with a total of eight additional alternate cuts! Thorough, but am I ever likely to watch all of those? No.)

As is regularly the case now, the vast majority of my purchases were 4K titles from boutique labels, including a bulk order from Australian label Imprint — headlined by a regular Blu-ray box set, After Dark: Neo-Noir Cinema, Collection Four, although even that includes one film (Unlawful Entry) in UHD. Along with it was more ’90s neo-noir in the form of Dark Blue, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (looks like horror to me, but they label it noir), and State of Grace; plus William Friedkin’s erotic thriller Jade and Hammer Horror Vampire Circus. Hammer themselves, meanwhile, stuck to the more niche side of their output with Brit-noir 36 Hours. Even more niche was The House of Hammer: Volume 1 — effectively a kind of “Blu-ray magazine”, containing two whole discs of special features and a “booklet” the length of a short book, but no feature film content. Like a sucker, I bought it anyway, thus committing myself to future releases (not literally “committed”, but I’m a completist). Rounding things out, Arrow’s latest John Woo title, Bullet in the Head; catching up with StudioCanal’s recent release of Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone; and even one title from a major studio, the Wachowskis’ blockbuster-turned-cult-classic adaptation of Speed Racer. I’ve been meaning to revisit that for years, so seeing its vibrant colours in HDR should be the push I need, right?

Right?

The 20th Monthly Review of June 2026

Posted on by
1

And we’re halfway through the year! But my Challenge? That’s not even a third completed…

To be honest, without wanting to go into too much detail, this year has been a struggle on a personal level, so it’s no wonder my film viewing has slipped so drastically. My current plan is to continue just picking away at it and I’ll see what happens. I’m not going to outright abandon it, but I’m not going to stress about it too much either, because I have other things to do that about.

In that spirit, onwards with the usual bits and pieces…



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#27 Is This Thing On? (2025) — New Film #2
#28 The Choral (2025) — Wildcard #5
#29 Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025) — Failure #6
#30 The Prince of Egypt (1998) — Blindspot #4


  • I watched four feature films I’d never seen before in June.
  • All of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, but no rewatches.
  • That’s more-or-less on-brand for 2026: my monthly average thus far has been just 5.0, when it needs to be 8.3 to reach 100 on schedule.
  • It has left me 19 films behind target, though. Yes, I should be at #49 by the end of June — you can thank the uncommon shortness of February for slightly unbalancing that target.
  • This month’s Blindspot film was Disney-esque Dreamworks musical animation The Prince of Egypt.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS film… wasn’t.
  • From last month’s “failures” I only watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.



The 133rd Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
Nothing I really loved this month, to be honest. I guess Is This Thing On? was the one with the most high-quality moments, even if overall it felt too long-winded and could’ve done with being tighter.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
I don’t remember The Prince of Egypt making much of a splash back when it came out (almost 30 years ago!), but it seems to have amassed a strong reputation since. Personally, I didn’t much care for it and don’t really understand its renaissance, but there you go.


Keep on keeping on.

May’s Failures

Posted on by
1

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

Posted on by
3

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.

April’s Failures

Posted on by
1

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.

I often think I should make more of an effort to get to the cinema, but then I look at what’s out and think, “to see what?” Sure, I’ll inevitably watch things like video game sequel The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Jacko biopic Michael when they come to a streamer I’m subscribed to (or add them to my watchlist, at least), but I don’t feel compelled to go out of my way to see them. I should probably make an effort to support smaller titles, like Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, but they don’t screen at my local, and once you add in the cost of travel and time to go further afield, the value proposition is even lower. It’s like this most months nowadays. Is it just me, or is it the state of modern cinema? I dunno.

Other big screen releases destined to end up on my watchlist someday included Zendaya / Robert Pattinson drama The Drama, Lee Cronin horror Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Oliver Assayas’s political thriller The Wizard of the Kremlin, and David Lowery’s pop-music-based psychological thriller Mother Mary.

The original offerings from streamers weren’t much more edifying. World Cup adjacent comedy Balls Up? Sounds balls. Greenland sequel Greenland: Migration? I never bothered with the first one, never mind a followup. Shark movie Thrash is the kind of genre fare I probably would’ve bunged on once upon a time, but I doubt I’ll make time for it nowadays. Action-thriller Apex at least boasts Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton, and Eric Bana among its cast, proving that recognisable names are still a factor in drawing a film to your attention. Literally all I know about Apple TV+’s Outcome is it stars Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz and was written and directed by actor Jonah Hill, but that was enough for me to notice it and bung it on this list. Mind you, the film I’m mostly likely to actually watch is Eat Pray Bark, because dogs.

There’s more interesting fare thanks to theatrical releases making their streaming debuts, like the revival of the Final Destination franchise, Final Destination: Bloodlines; or Zach Cregger’s Oscar-winning horror Weapons; or Richard Linklater’s Oscar-nominated Blue Moon; or Dwayne Johnson’s attempt at Oscar bait, The Smashing Machine; or Ari Aster’s Eddington; or Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing; or Crime 101, which I swear was only just in cinemas. (Those are spread around between NOW and Amazon Prime Video, if you’re interested. Don’t think there was any Netflix in there. There’s even less to say about the other streamers… so I won’t.)

A plethora of back catalogue stuff vies for a mention, as usual. Netflix seemed to mop up a bunch of Warner Bros films, possibly in anticipation of the acquisition that didn’t happen, including DC superhero flicks like Blue Beetle, The Flash, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, none of which are new and all of which have been on my watchlist since whatever streamer they used to be on; possibly across several. I can’t quite decide if I’ve finally ‘grown out’ of superhero movies or if the ones they’re churning out now are just uninteresting. But I didn’t dislike James Gunn’s Superman and enjoyed the first season of Daredevil: Born Again (I still need to start the second), so maybe it is them not me.

What else? John Woo’s remake of his own film, The Killer, jumped from NOW to Netflix. Meg 2: The Trench also moved there from… er, wherever it used to be… reminding me that I quite enjoyed the first one and did mean to watch the second. The Magic Mike trilogy also collated itself there (I feel like those three films are constantly popping on and off various services, but are rarely to be found in one place all at once). Over on Prime Video, the 2021 Mortal Kombat popped up ahead of the forthcoming sequel, while other recent-ish things I’ve been meaning to catch up with included The Bikeriders, Freaky, and King Richard; plus, looking back some way (as in “six decades”), the third Harry Palmer film, Billion Dollar Brain.

Even worse, the stuff goading me that I bought it and haven’t watched it still: Alita: Battle Angel, the new(er) Candyman, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire all on Prime. Even worse…er: on iPlayer, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. You know you’ve left stuff a long time when it’s been on free-to-air TV. And that’s just the recent-ish films — how’s about American Gangster, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and La La Land on Netflix (all titles I’ve owned on at least two formats, including 4K, but not watched the latter yet); on iPlayer, Don’t Look Now, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and The Wicker Man; on Amazon, But I’m a Cheerleader, Heat, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Thelma & Louise, Time Bandits, all the Spider-Man films, and a tonne of Gamera films. I didn’t bother to note exactly how many — the important point is, I’ve got Arrow’s complete series set from 2020 that I’ve not started.

No box sets quite that big in April’s selection of new purchases — just a trilogy of Japanese Godfather films from Radiance and the Wandering Ginza Butterfly duo from Arrow. Talking of John Woo’s The Killer (as I was two paragraphs back), the original made it to 4K this month courtesy of Arrow. (I was tempted to put them both in this post’s header image, but… I didn’t.) Other classics (how “classic” these “classics” are, I’ll leave up to you) making their way to 4K disc included Tsui Hark’s One Armed Swordsman remake The Blade from Criterion, neo-noir Cutter’s Way from Radiance; and a pair of Hammer titles from StudioCanal, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and Demons of the Mind. Maybe I should stop buying everything that gets put out from Hammer’s back catalogue, but, well, I’ve started now. It would be less bad if I did something truly radical and actually watched more of them…

The 20th Monthly Review of April 2026

Posted on by
3

We’re one-third of the way through 2026, but my film viewing hasn’t even reached the one-quarter mark of my Challenge. Oh dear.

Still, April was the strongest month of the year so far, and the goal isn’t out of reach yet. More about the exact numbers behind those observations in my viewing notes; first, the films I did watch:



This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#13 Breakout (1959) — Series Progression #3
#14 Ordeal by Innocence (1984) — Wildcard #2
#15 One Battle After Another (2025) — Failure #4
#16 Nonnas (2025) — Wildcard #3
#17 3-D Rarities (2015) — Genre #1
#18 Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) — Blindspot #2
#19 Conclave (2024) — 50 Unseen #2
#20 Hope Gap (2019) — Wildcard #4
#21 A Wednesday (2008) — WDYMYHS #2


  • I watched nine feature films I’d never seen before in April.
  • That makes this the best month of 2026 to date by some margin, although it still falls short of my ten-film target.
  • All nine counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, but no rewatches this month.
  • The target for the end of April is #33, so I’m still 12 films behind.
  • With 79 films to go in the next eight months, that’s a required average of 9.88 Challenge films per month — slightly up from 9.78 after March. Still some work to be done to stand a chance of catching up, then.
  • 3-D Rarities is my first Genre film for 2026, making that the last category to get underway.
  • This month’s Blindspot film was French New Wave drama Hiroshima Mon Amour.
  • This month’s WDYMYHS film was Indian antiterrorism thriller A Wednesday.
  • From last month’s “failures” I watched only One Battle After Another.



The 131st Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
It was the most recent Best Picture winner and a Paul Thomas Anderson film — two things that some people (not necessarily the same people) would take as an unimpeachable mark of quality, but which are very much “wait and see” indicators for me. But as it turns out, they were right, and I thought One Battle After Another was fantastic.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
I imagine that, back when it was released in 2008, A Wednesday felt timely and relevant. Nowadays, it’s dated both stylistically (its camerawork and editing is heavily indebted to other early-21st-century works in the genre) and politically (its chosen antiterrorism angle feels ickily far right in light of the present-day landscape).


I’ve got a very busy May coming up — I wouldn’t be surprised if progress gets knocked back again. And I can state with a high degree of confidence that, if I’m ever going to turn things around and re-start publishing reviews, it won’t happen next month.