What I've Caught Up With, May 2026 Part 1

With the stated goal of 400 movies viewed for the year, I needed to see 34 in May to break even. I watched 35, so I caught up a single movie, putting me seven off the pace. Honestly, that's pretty good for me. Normally at this point, I'm a couple of dozen behind where I want to be. It was a pretty normal month. Nothing too bizarre, aside from a week where, due to circumstances, I didn't watch much of anything. Had I been a bit more dilligent, I might have caught up all the way.

What I’ve Caught Up With, May 2026 Part 1
Film: Blue Beetle (2023)

Why did Blue Beetle fail as a movie in the DCEU? There are a number of issues that went into this. One is superhero fatigue. We’ve been inundated with superhero movies for going on two decades (Iron Man came out in 2008). The character is unknown to all but the biggest comic book fans. And, honestly, this is pretty standard fare. A kid (Xolo Maridueña) discovers a connection to an ancient artifact that gives him super powers and he needs to use them to defend his family and prevent that power from falling into the hands of corporate interests (mainly, Susan Sarandon). I’m just enough of a comic book nerd to remember when Blue Beetle was the unpowered tech genius Ted Kord—I’d have preferred that version here only because it’s the one I know.

Film: Amphibian Man (1962)

A surprisingly popular Russian film that clearly expresses Soviet ideals, Amphibian Man is an odd bit of science fiction and something that feels like an inspiration for The Shape of Water. A scientist (Nikolai Simonov) has a son named Ikthyander (Vladimir Korenev) with a lung infection, so the scientist gives him the ability to breathe underwater. When he saves a young woman named Gutiere (Anastasiya Vertinskaya), he immediately falls in love, causing complications with her arranged marriage to a rich local. That rich local (Mikhail Kozakov) wants to capture our titular character to take over the local pearl diving economy. It admittedly sounds kind of dumb, but it’s surprisingly good and surprisingly relevant. Worth noting that star Vladimir Korenev is oddly handsome in that 1960s Eurotrash way.

Film: Westward the Women (1951)

In California, rich employer Roy Whitman (John McIntire) promises his men wives to keep them working, and hires experienced trail boss Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor) to lead the party of 140 prospective brides across the prairie. That’s enough for nearly two hours of plot that, honestly, feels like Oregon Trail: The Movie. Don’t take that as a complaint on my part: Westward the Women, while sexist in its own way both for the Western setting and the 1950s in which it was made, makes heroes out of ordinary women looking for a better life on a trip filled with danger and hardship. That said, evidently one of the men waiting for the women was in the Donner Party, and Buck claims that the women had it worse, and he does use a whip on his love interest. I mean…yikes!

Film: Sleep Dealer (2008)

In a near-future dystopia, people are fitted with nodes, allowing them to plug into networks. While the nodes are frequently used for sex and for sharing memories, they are also used in third world countries to have workers plug into machines, essentially operating them remotely. Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) is a subsistence farmer, dealing with the fact that local waters have been dammed and must be paid for. Memo builds radios and attracts the attention of the company controlling the local dam, which sees him as a threat and calls in a drone strike, killing his father. Memo leaves, gets nodes implanted, and tries to live his life, but writer Luz (Leonor Varela) sells memories of him, attracting the notice of Rudy (Jacob Vargas), the drone pilot who killed Memo’s father. It’s low-budget and has eyes bigger than its stomach in terms of ideas, but I’m always going to give a lot of leeway to a movie that is this earnest in what it wants to do.

Film: Deadline at Dawn (1946)

A sailor (Bill Williams) wakes up sitting in a newsstand with a pocketful of cash and no memory of the previous two hours. He’s convinced by cynical dance hall girl June (Susan Hayward) to return the money to the woman he is convinced he took it from. When he returns to her apartment, he discovers the woman dead. Now, with just a few hours before his bus takes him back to his military base, the sailor needs to solve the case before he is accused of a murder he doesn’t think he’s committed but might have. Deadline at Dawn is a pretty solid film noir, although the ending comes as too pat and too Hollywood to really have it work.

Film: Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Thus ends the Apes pentalogy, with a film that finally truly pits ape and man against each other. While apes and humans live together in a cobbled-together city (with the apes in charge and humans frequently penned), mutant humans still live beneath the city ruined by nuclear weaponry in the past. Looking for information, the apes head to the city, get discovered, and war ensues, pitting apes against humans and eventually apes against apes. The cast is surprising—in addition to the expected Roddy McDowell and Natalie Trundy, Lew Ayres, Claude Aikens, Paul Williams, and John Huston all put on the ape costumes. This honestly isn’t that great, but if you’ve come this far, you might as well finish.

Film: The Rocketeer (1991)

Somebody watched way too much Commando Cody as a kid, and thus we have The Rocketeer, based on an early-‘80s comic book of the same name. Flyboy Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) winds up in possession of a Howard Hughes-created jet pack. He’s forced on the run when the jet pack proves to be the ultimate MacGuffin, desired by the Feds, organized crime, and star actor Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) who is working for the Nazis in pre-War California. It’s a fun adventure, but the effects definitely look 35 years old. The cast is a fun one, including Jennifer Connelly, Alan Arkin, Paul Sorvino and more. There’s also a clear reference to Rondo Hatton in the form of Sinclair’s thug Lothar (Ron Taylor, aka Tiny Ron). The plot is obvious, but this is boys’ own adventure stuff, so knowing where we’re going doesn’t really matter.

Film: The Rainmaker (1997)

Sometimes I wonder if there’s political action committee that exists to make people root for lawyers. I freely admit that I love a good legal drama, and the best ones include an idealistic lawyer fighting for truth and justice. Enter The Rainmaker where a young lawyer named Rudy Baylor (a Dixie-fied Matt Damon) hooks up with a dishonest ambulance chaser, but breaks away working on a case regarding a young man with leukemia. He also gets involved with a battered wife (Claire Danes). Accompanied by an insurance expert (Danny DeVito), Rudy learns just how vicious the law can be. Honestly, it’s a solid movie, and the cast is a Who’s Who of A- and B-list Hollywood talent. I’m honestly a little surprised this didn’t get turned into a television show; it has all the makings of something that could’ve easily run 6-8 seasons.