leebutler Comedy, Review

One Of Them Days (2025) – Best Buds

Released: 6th March
Seen: 16th June

The buddy comedy is a staple of cinema that has created absolute legends of the genre. Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Cheech & Chong, some truly iconic comedy pairings have been the backbone of this genre. It’s a genre that lives and dies on the chemistry of the two leads; a truly great comedic pairing can make any film work even if the script isn’t that good. Entire careers have been made just from how good a couple of actors bounce off each other. It’s a tricky thing to make work, but when the stars align, you can get something pretty special. In One Of Them Days, we get to introduce the new comedic coupling of Keke Palmer and Sza, a double act that I don’t think anyone really would’ve expected to happen, but now that it exists, it’s actually pretty amazing to behold.

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leebutler Action, Comedy, Review, Romance

Love Hurts (2025) – Painful

Released: 6th February
Seen: 31st May

It’s always kind of fascinating to see what film an Oscar winner chooses as their big follow up, the movie they put themselves front and centre for that can basically be advertised with the phrase “Starring Oscar Winner”. Sometimes it can be an important personal work of art that the actor managed to finally get produced because they have an Oscar to their name, sometimes it’s a fun romp that shows they have a wide range outside of the film that got them the award in the first place… sadly, often times, the big follow up to an Oscar-winning performance is a massive dud that feels like it’s wasting it’s big star. Love Hurts does something really impressive in that it feels like it’s wasting two Oscar winners and that’s the only impressive thing it does for its entire runtime.

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leebutler Review, Thriller

Locked (2025) – Open Up

Released: 21st March
Seen: 30th May

A kind of story that we just don’t get enough of in cinema nowadays is “Person confined in a single space we almost never leave” Buried is a pretty great example of this kind of film, a film that takes place entirely in the confines of a coffin with someone buried alive inside it. It’s a deceptively simple idea but works really well in practice. It’s also remarkably cheap, the biggest expense being the lead actor you put in the single location and if done well it can be truly spectacular. There are a lot of challenges that come with making a film about one character and a voice on the phone in a small isolated location, but it’s such a simple and effective setup that I’m always looking for more films with that basic scenario to see what they can do. Well, now we have a new one in the form of Locked and it has got some great elements but it also doesn’t seem to know what to do with all of them.

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leebutler Horror, Review

The Monkey (2025) – Monkeying Around

Released: 21st February
Seen: 29th May

It is a truth universally accepted by anyone who is cool that Stephen King is the greatest horror author of the last 50 years. His stories are modern classics, transforming the way horror books are viewed in the literary world and serving as the foundation for some of the greatest films of the last several decades. He is a truly prolific author with over 65 novels and 200 short stories under his pen and by the time I’ve posted this specific review he will have undoubtedly added to that (To repeat George R.R. Martin’s question to Stephen King “How the fuck do you write so many books so fast?”). He’s also infamous for taking basic everyday things and making them terrifying. This is such a well-known thing that it served as the foundation for a pretty great cutaway gag from an early episode of Family Guy, where Stephen King tried to sell his publisher on the idea of a book about a cursed lamp. It’s a Stephen King classic, take a basic thing we’ve all seen and twist it into something terrifying. For his 1980 short story The Monkey, he did this by taking a wind-up monkey toy that would clash a pair of cymbals and made it into a mysterious force of evil that led to elaborate, brutal deaths. Now, in 2025, the director Osgood Perkins took that idea and ran with it to bring us The Monkey, a high-energy horror comedy that is one of the most exciting films of the year.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Mystery, Review

Fountain of Youth (2025) – Ancient

Released: 23rd May
Seen: 26th May

The first streaming company to ever win a Best Picture Oscar was Apple TV+ who pulled off this genuinely impressive feat with a little film called CODA, a touching little comedy about a family where everyone except the eldest daughter was deaf and how she wanted to break out on her own even though that would end up creating a problem for her family and their business. It was a genuinely impressive moment for Apple, their streaming service was one of the smaller ones on the market with only eight narrative feature films to their name at that point. It gave them some sort of prestige, maybe Apple was going to be the smart streaming service that would make smaller interesting films that could be awards contenders or at least not churn out films so bland and basic that the term ‘content’ is the only way to fairly describe them… and now they’ve released Fountain of Youth, Apple’s moved into the content industry.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Thriller

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) – One Final Adventure

Released: 17th May
Seen: 25th May

The Mission: Impossible franchise has been a part of the cinematic landscape since 1996. Some people who were conceived on the opening night are now weeks away from turning 30, that’s a staggering amount of time for us to have been watching the ever-growing world-ending adventures of Ethan Hunt and his pack of associates who are as expendable as they are available for the shooting schedule required. No matter what your stance is on the franchise, it’s hard to deny that it’s been an iconic action franchise the likes of which we will not see again for quite a long time. Partially we won’t see it because we just will never see another star like Tom Cruise again who, despite how you might feel about him deciding to be a spokesman for one of the most evil organizations ever to exist on Planet Earth (WHERE IS SHELLY!?), is an undeniably charismatic superstar who can make even the flimsiest of action premises enjoyable thanks to his utter devotion to the craft. So here we are, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which is allegedly the final film in this franchise… I’ll believe that when I don’t see it but if this is the note that the franchise is going out on, I’m not gonna be mad about it.

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leebutler Comedy, Horror, Review

Screamboat (2025) – Oh Boy!

Released: 2nd April
Seen: 26th May

On the 28th of December last year, I subjected myself to the absolutely horrific piece of garbage known as The Mouse Trap which had the distinct honour of being the first horror film to take advantage of the fact that Steamboat Willie entered the public domain. That film was so god awful that it made it to the top of my worst of the year list, an honour it would’ve gotten even if last year was a normal year for me where there were 10 films on such a list. It was a truly putrid film that was the perfect example of a film made to cheaply cash in on something being public domain. No cleverness, no joy, just a shitty generic slasher with a Mickey Mouse mask on because you could legally get away with it. At the end of my review of that “film” I pointed out that the next film that was going to play with the idea of Mickey Mouse as a killer would be called Screamboat and all I wanted was for it to be somewhat better than The Mouse Trap was…well, Screamboat is the exact film I was hoping for when I heard that they were making a horror movie about Steamboat Willie.

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leebutler Horror, Mystery, Netflix, Review, Thriller

Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025) – Down With Prom

Released: 23rd May
Seen: 24th May

In 2021, a horror film event happened that really showed the potential for what could be done with a streaming platform that wanted people to notice what it was releasing. Over the course of three weeks Netflix released the Fear Street Trilogy, a set of horror films inspired by the R.L. Stine books that all took place in different time periods, played around in different eras of the horror/slasher genre, and all connected to create a grand overarching story. It was dark, twisted, queer and just a ton of fun. I even named the entire trilogy as one of the best films of 2021, which is a choice I stand by because every single entry did something truly great within the slasher genre. They were films that understood what makes the genre fun and their success as an event pretty much guaranteed that there was going to be more. When they announced that we were going to get a new entry with the subtitle Prom Queen, this reviewer was excited at the prospect… never be excited about things, it leads to disappointment.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) – Dead Perfect

Released: 15th May
Seen: 24th May

The Final Destination franchise has straight up ruined an entire generation of people. Don’t believe me, find a person born roughly around 1985-1990 and put them on a highway with a single log truck within their field of vision and I can guarantee you they will have a panic attack and pull the car off the road because they vividly remember the opening of the second movie. For years the Final Destination series was a Horror movie joyride, a franchise built around the idea of one person having a premonition of a major accident with a death toll in the hundreds and getting their friends and a few strangers out in time to avoid it. Naturally, death would take out those remaining victims in a very specific order using Rube Goldberg devices of death that would end in some truly insane sequences. For 5 films between 2000 and 2011, audiences were treated to a glorious wave of catastrophic carnage but it felt like that was going to be it. Sure there were talks about reviving the franchise for years but it never happened so it became a nostalgia property for a specific generation of people… and now thanks to Final Destination: Bloodlines, this campy little franchise is back for more and it’s truly glorious.

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leebutler Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Review

Heart Eyes (2025) – Love

Released: 13th February
Seen: 13th May

The Holiday Slasher is an idea that basically defined the boom period of the slasher genre back in the 80s, the idea being that a producer could just pick any random holiday and make a movie around it. This simple idea led us down the rabbit hole of My Bloody Valentine, Leprechaun, Silent Night Deadly Night, Thanksgiving and about a hundred other horror films of varying quality. Of course, lately there’s been a lot less of this kind of film, mostly because every holiday was already handled by a film from the 80s, so there’s not much new territory to tread on here. If you can’t do something new though, at least do something fun, and Heart Eyes is doing something very fun.

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