leebutler Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Music, Musical

Kpop Demon Hunters (2025) – Perfection

Released: 20th June
Seen: 10th December

We are officially at the point where the K-pop genre has hit critical mass, probably been there for a while thanks to supergroups like Blackpink or BTS showing how dominant they can be on the pop charts. This is part of an era that, according to my research, is known as the Korean Wave and hopefully when we talk about the absolutely insane rise of K-pop and the Korean wave in general in the future, we need to take the time to mention Kpop Demon Hunters, which feels like the kind of movie that can only exist now that K-pop has become such a massive element of pop culture that it has the incredible mass appeal that this work of art has.

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leebutler Adventure, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Review, Romance

Snow White (2025) – Rotting Apple

Released: 20th March
Seen: 26th June

It’s hard to describe how much the world changed on December 21st, 1937, when Walt Disney premiered his feature-length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Up to that point, no one thought it was possible; movies were still a young medium at that point, but animated cartoons were meant to just be small things put at the front of the proper movie, never the actual main event. Disney changed all that and created an entire genre of cinema. The original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is an undeniable classic, even without the historical relevance that comes with being the first of its kind; it’s also just a fantastic film with songs that we still hum to this day and some of the most iconic characters in the animated medium. It’s one of those retellings that redefined the original story. When you think of the story of Snow White there’s a good chance you think of the Disney version, you almost certainly revert to the names Doc, Sneezy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, Sleepy and Dopey for the dwarfs. It’s a piece of cinematic history that we should respect… and by “We” I mean “Disney” because based on what they did with the 2025 remake, I don’t think they respect their own history at all.

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leebutler Biography, Fantasy, Music, Musical, Review

Better Man (2024) – A Different Man

Released: 26th December 2024
Seen: 24th February 2025

Biopics in general have never been my thing, mostly because they’re pretty much all the same. A performer gets famous, does a lot of drugs, pisses off a lot of people before finally pulling through and becoming the superstar that was worthy of making a biopic about. It’s all the same and only ever becomes interesting based on the lead actor’s performance. It’s such a predictable formula you can almost guess what song will be performed after each drug-taking montage if you know enough of the main musician’s hit songs. The only biopic in recent memory that was actually good enough to make me enjoy it would be Rocketman which took the life of Elton John and turned it into a lavish musical that ignored the constraints of linear time to present the story of Elton’s life. I’ve been genuinely waiting for someone to look at that movie and steal what made it work to see if it could be replicated, imagine my surprise when Take That bad boy Robbie Williams did that exact thing and threw in a CGI monkey just for the fucking hell of it.

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leebutler Comedy, Crime, Drama, Musical, Review, Thriller

Emilia Pérez (2025) – Oscar Bait

Released: 16th January
Seen: 26th January

Throughout my time writing this blog, I have made a point to champion when a film presents a minority group in its narrative – even if the film itself is not particularly great, it still deserves praise for breaking the mould and showing people as they are. This has been particularly notable when it comes to a film that presents members of the LGBTQ+ community since, as a member of the G part of that acronym, it’s nice to see those in your social group represented. Even subpar representation is still, on some level, representation and deserves to be brought up. It also feels important to bring this up in regards to films that are getting Awards nominations, particularly at the Oscars who have a bad history related to this. Enter this year’s biggest Oscar nominee Emilia Pérez which might be the most high-profile story about a trans woman in cinema this year… and sadly it’s just not a good film, to the point that it’s baffling that it’s become this awards darling.

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Review

Moana 2 (2024) – You’re Welcome

Released: 27th November
Seen: 15th December

In the screening for Moana 2 that I went to, the cinema was pretty packed with a ton of parents bringing their children to see the sequel to the 2016 original. Kids who were so young that it’s possible they weren’t even alive when the original Moana came out. These kids probably have only seen a handful of films in their life and one of them is going to be Moana 2, a formative feature film in their lives that will linger for a while as it introduces them to the magic of cinema. When you see little kids watching Moana 2 and see the joy it puts in their eyes, it’s kind of hard to say anything particularly negative about the film in general because it makes it clear how much it does not matter. The target audience does not care about critical reviews, they do not care about story structure or pacing because they’re just there to see this super awesome girl called Moana do some super awesome things and that’s great. I’m glad that Moana 2 is going to be a good first film for a lot of kids… I just wish it lived up to its potential to be a great first film.

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leebutler Fantasy, Musical, Review, Romance

Wicked: Part One (2024) – Green With Envy

Released: 1st August
Seen: 24th November

On October 30th 2003, the Gershwin Theatre presented the opening night performance of a little musical about a woman with green skin battling adversity and learning her true power through friendship with a hyperactive floating Barbie… that show was Wicked and to this day that show has captured audiences around the world. As of writing this sentence, it’s the second highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time, the fourth longest-running show in Broadway history and has been toured around the world so many times that it would be impossible to calculate just how many people have seen the show. It is a genre-defining artwork, one that has been talked about being turned into a movie since approximately 47 seconds after a movie producer heard Idina Menzel sing Defying Gravity for the first time and knew that this show needed to be captured on film… it’s taken them 20 years, it’s not the cast that they expected to get and it’s split a 2-hour-long stage show into two movies of 2+ hours each, but it looks like they absolutely nailed it.

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leebutler Comedy, Musical, Review

Mean Girls (2024) – Fetch

Released: 11th January
Seen: 1st April

Mean Girls Info

In 2004, the film Mean Girls was released and changed the cultural landscape as we know it. It’s kind of staggering to think about just how much of current pop culture can be traced back to that one film. The obvious things it did was demonstrate that Lindsay Lohan wasn’t just a child actress and mark the start of Tina Fey’s rise as a comedic force but it also created a ton of jokes that are still referenced today. Fetch, She Doesn’t Even Go Here, Too Gay To Function, the concept of wearing pink on a certain day of the week and the phrase “Cool Mom” all can be linked back to Mean Girls. It defined an entire generation’s sense of humour, it can’t be understated the kind of cultural impact that it had. Hell, it’s 20 years later and we’re still talking about it, and not just because they adapted it into a stage musical which then got adapted into a film musical, the one I’ll be talking about today.

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leebutler Drama, Musical, Review

The Color Purple (2024) – Hell Yes

Released: 25th January
Seen: 1st February

In 1982, Alice Walker released her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple which received rave reviews and massive sales. That book caught the eye of one Steven Spielberg who turned it into the beloved 1985 film that’s not only gone on to be a beloved cinematic classic but essentially jumpstarted the careers of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey, so it’s hard to deny its importance as a piece of cinema. Twenty years after the film was released, somebody got the bright idea to turn this dramatic tale into a musical where it would initially get poor reviews but, upon being revived in 2015, got the recognition it deserved as a truly great work. Now it can have that recognition forever since we have The Color Purple musical on film and it’s truly something worth singing some praises about.

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Review

Wish (2023) – …well

Released: 26th December
Seen: 17th December (Advanced Screening)

Wish Info

In 1923, Walt and Roy Disney founded a little company called the Disney Brothers Studio to produce a small series of Alice in Wonderland cartoons. A few years later the company would be renamed Walt Disney Studios and a little cartoon called Steamboat Willie (which is soon gonna be public domain… so look forward to how that’ll be used!) would not only become the first cartoon with synchronized sound but essentially transform the company into a household name. They would go on to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the first animated feature-length film which would begin a long several decades as the most well-known and influential animation company on the planet. 

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leebutler Comedy, Musical, Review

Dicks: The Musical (2023) – Absolutely Nuts

Released: 7th December
Seen: 5th December

Dicks: The Musical Info

In 2014 Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson put on a two-man show called F***ing Identical Twins. The show ended up being noticed by someone at 20th Century Fox and was bought in 2016 with the intent of being turned into a musical… and then the Fox-Disney merger happened, a lot of projects got thrown around like metaphors in a desperate writer’s head and soon the project landed at A24 where it got a rename, a high-end cast complete with Tony and Emmy winners galore and legendary comedy director Larry Charles. With a combination like that behind it, it should’ve been inevitable that Dicks: The Musical would turn out to be one of the funniest movies to hit cinemas in recent years.

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