leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Clown In A Cornfield (2025) – Friendo Loves You

Released: 8th May
Seen: 24th August

In 2020, Adam Cesare released the young adult novel Clown in a Cornfield. The novel was a big success, ending up winning the Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel and pretty much instantly getting optioned for a film. There would end up being 2 more novels written in the Clown in a Cornfield series over the years but the film took a little while to get made (probably because 2020 was not exactly a great time to try and film a movie, what with all the COVID hanging around) but eventually a little film called Clown in a Cornfield came out and made a brief splash before getting eclipsed by Final Destination: Bloodlines… which is a shame because it’s the kind of movie that deserves a lot more love.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Review

Weapons (2025) – Loaded

Released: 7th August
Seen: 23rd August

In 2022, the film Barbarian was released to an unsuspecting public. No one knew what it was about and audiences kept the core details quiet so everyone could be surprised but there was one thing that was pretty universally acknowledged by those who saw it… Barbarian was one of the best horror movies of 2022. That’s saying quite a lot, because 2022 is widely considered one of the best years for horror cinema in general. Hell, when I made my best-of list for 2022, a solid half of the list was horror films, with Barbarian being the highest on the list. After that movie I was truly excited and a little nervous to see what writer/director Zach Cregger would do for an encore… turns out he would go absolutely fucking insane and for that we thank him and ask him to do it again as soon as possible.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Thriller

Dangerous Animals (2025) – Bloody Good Time

Released: 12th July
Seen: 15th August

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, sometimes the simplest ideas done well make for the best movies. An elevator pitch, a single sentence concept played out to its absolute limit, is often a great way to ensure a fun, exciting film for the audience. This feels especially true regarding Horror films which can have concepts as basic as “Girl going through puberty has telekinetic powers” or “Man in mask stalks babysitters”…. Or, in the case of Dangerous Animals, “Shark obsessed serial killer goes on a spree”, and in its brutal brilliant simplicity you end up with one of the most gloriously fun horror films of the year.

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leebutler Drama, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Drop (2025) – Pick Me Up

Released: 17th April
Seen: 9th August

Every time a new technology comes out, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the horror genre takes it on and plays with its darker elements. AI brought us M3GAN, mobile phones led straight to the novel Cell by Stephen King. This goes back to VHS’s ending up inspiring things like The Ring, so every new piece of tech can be used in a terrifying way. A pretty perfect piece of technology for this exact situation would be something like the airdrop, a way for someone to just anonymously drop an image or message onto your phone without needing to know your number. They don’t need to know who you are, you just have to be within range and then you can have whatever they want sent to you. Drop takes this idea of a mysterious man sending secret messages to someone and it is pulse-poundingly brilliant.

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leebutler Action, Comedy, Crime, Review, Thriller

Novocaine No Pain (2025) – Painless

Released: 13th March
Seen: 9th August

Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) is a rare medical condition that basically makes the person who is born with it (as it’s a genetic disease) unable to feel pain. On the one hand, this sounds like a great thing, a life without pain sounds good in theory, but in practice, it means that it’s easy to do things like bite off sections of your tongue or burn yourself without ever noticing you’re doing it. It’s the kind of medical condition that’s a favourite of strange medical shows because what show isn’t going to love a story about someone who doesn’t feel pain. It doesn’t seem to get much time in the sun when it comes to cinema, though, until Novocaine No Pain (which is what the movie Novocaine has been titled in Australia, for reasons that make no sense) which is possibly the first CIP Action Comedy and it’s just generally fantastic.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) – Four-tunate!

Released: 24th July
Seen: 7th August

The Fantastic Four might be one of those cursed properties when it comes to movies as it seems like every version that’s been attempted has fallen into some kind of major problem. There was the initial attempt to make a movie back in 1994, which was made in order to maintain the rights and was never meant to be released (Go watch Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s the Fantastic Four for more on that, but it was a fucking debacle). After that was the 2005 version, which is the version most people know but ended up being so cheesy and bad that its main legacy was to give Chris Evans a chance to reveal that he was Human Torch for a reference joke in the Deadpool & Wolverine movie. Lastly, there was Fan4stic, a 2015 gritty reboot that was so bad it made people think that the first family of Marvel just couldn’t be made into a film. Every 10 years they’ve tried and every 10 years they have failed to adapt this iconic quartet to film but now it’s time for the iconic Marvel Studios to have a try. After all, the first three adaptations were done by Roger Corman and Fox Studios, but the MCU hadn’t gotten their hands on it yet… and I don’t know what magic the MCU has that everyone else didn’t, but they finally got a version that works.

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The Superman logo in front of a blurred image of Superman and Krypto looking over the earth
leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

Superman (2025) – Doing Good

Released: 10th July
Seen: 16th July

Superman info An image of the Superman poster on the left sidem, on the right the information "Directed and written by James Gunn" and "Starring: David Corenswet, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Brosnahan"

Now that it’s officially over, we can admit that the DCEU was an interesting experiment that went off the rails almost instantly. A franchise born out of an attempt to play catch-up to Marvel, it tried to be the alternative to the MCU in every way. If Marvel was bright and colourful, the DCEU was dark and dour. If the MCU took its time to build up to major events, the DCEU would do major event films pretty much right away and fill in the blanks afterwards. If the MCU was good, the DCEU was… bad, for the most part. That entire franchise was bad, and one of the elements that will probably age the worst in hindsight was its portrayal of the big Blue Boy Scout, Superman. Don’t get me wrong, Henry Cavill was a pretty great embodiment of what a superhero should look like in terms of physical mass, but there was something that always felt like it was missing from the character, a specific trait that made Superman an icon that has lasted for nearly a century… kindness. The DCEU seemed devoid of the notion of kindness and light, and thus it felt like Superman was just flat out wrong. Well, now DC is under new movie management and to restart the cinematic universe, James Gunn has brought us a brand new Superman and remembered to stop and pick up a little bit of kindness on the way.

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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 Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Review, Sci-Fi

Elio (2025) – Space!

Released: 19th June
Seen: 23rd June

Original movies are becoming something of a rarity these days, either relegated to the indie circuit or they have to be made by some well-known auteur who has enough cache to get his weird original concepts past the studio system. Look at the top 10 highest-grossing films of this year, with the notable exception of Sinners, they’re all either sequels, remakes or based on a very well-known piece of IP. It’s a sad reality that audiences just aren’t going to see original films at the rate that they used to. There could be many reasons for this, a run on effect of higher theatre ticket prices meaning people want as close to a sure bet as they can get, part of the post-Covid era issues, it could be related to the rise of streaming or the saturation of the market or it could even just be a horrible self fulfilling prophecy where the big studios don’t advertise their original films that well so people don’t know about them. Case in point, did you know there was a brand new original Pixar film in cinemas right now that’s not a sequel to Toy Story or any of their other classics and that it’s also deliriously charming? Well, now you do.

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leebutler Drama, Review, Romance

We Live In Time (2025) – Pause

Released: 16th January
Seen: 17th June

Sometimes a film doesn’t really need a great script, fancy camera tricks or an insane amount of special effects in order to be enjoyable. Sometimes, all a film needs in order to captivate an audience is a good central cast who can carry it through. Throughout history, there are endless numbers of films made almost entirely because one or two lead actors signed on and used their star power to push it into creation, one such example is What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? which basically exists because Bette Davis knew a film with her and Joan Crawford would be amazing. The combination of leads can create a truly special thing that will stand the test of time… and sometimes it can just be a pretty decent experience with a great pair of lead performances. 

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