I try to post these roundups as soon as I can after each month closes but I’m barely getting this one in before October. And it does seem like a long time ago that I saw Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” at the theater, but the disappointment still lingers.

It’s not wise to walk into any of this director’s movies expecting perfection, but I’ve come to expect, at least, a kind of thrilling audacity, a go-for-broke sensibility that bends narrative and polemic together in unexpected ways. That’s what Lee’s 2015 film “Chi-Raq” was like: not altogether successful, but still wildly ambitious, and pretty amazing to watch.

By contrast, “BlacKkKlansman” is almost shockingly…conventional. Its crazy premise—an African-American cop fools the Ku Klux Klan into accepting him as one of their own—never reveals itself to be anything crazier than the way it’s described—no new layers are peeled back, no unexpected twists are presented. It’s just kind of boring, actually. And by the end, when Lee hastily motors through various plot resolutions and tries to tie the movie’s historical milieu into present day events, the total effect feels slapdash. A missed opportunity.

Here are all fifteen movies I watched way back in August.

• “The Shape of Water” Better than I expected, but still no masterpiece.
• “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” Terrific on rewatch.
• “Performance” One of those cult films that I could care less for.
• “From the Land of the Moon” Pretty ridiculous but for the most part well made.
• “Suspicion” Hitchcock on auto-pilot.
• “Jack Reacher” My wife wanted to watch it again, and I didn’t say no.
• “Night Train to Munich” Kindergarten-level action and suspense.
• “BlacKkKlansman”
• “Mission: Impossible” Rewtached again, this time with family.
• “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” See above.
• “Casque d’Or” Unexpectedly seamy—and gripping—belle époque tragedy.
• “The Ipcress File” Stylish but boring.
• “North by Northwest” Rewatched for the first time since I was fifteen; I was shocked how goofy it is.
• “xXx: Return of Xander Cage” Total garbage.
• “Red Sparrow” The kind of movie they don’t make anymore, just not made that well.

If you’re interested, here is what I watched in July,
June, May, April, March, February and January. You can also see my complete list of everything I watched in 2017 and follow along with my film diary over at letterboxd.com.