leebutler Action, Adventure, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Review, Sci-Fi

Thunderbolts* (2025) – THUNDER!!

Released: 1st May
Seen: 9th May

The Marvel Cinematic Universe will forever be a legendary moment in cinema, a franchise like this going for almost 2 decades with film and TV series creating this wide interconnected universe is almost unheard of and has rarely been as well executed as it has been here. Lately though, it feels like the MCU has been in a slump since the insane high of Endgame. Sure, there’ve been some bright spots, but nothing rose to the level of the MCU before Thanos snapped his fingers. It felt like everything was so spread out that it was hard to return to what made this franchise special. So here we find ourselves with another entry in the long-running franchise… and it might be the best one since Endgame and possibly in the top 10 of the entire MCU experiment, it’s that good.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Companion (2025) – Hearty

Released: 30th January
Seen: 21st April

One of the best things in a good horror film is a twist, a moment when the narrative takes a sharp left-hand turn out of seemingly nowhere and takes the audience on a thrill ride. There’s been a few recent horror films that have been spectacular at this, things like Barbarian where it set itself up as a film about two people stuck in an Airbnb overnight and ended up being one of the most demented films of the year or The Perfection which took the concept of a ‘twist” and dialled it up to 11 to see just how many twists it could fit into 90 minutes without the audience losing its mind. Today’s film, Companion, is a terrifically twisted take on the romance film that takes a few big swings and mostly makes them work.

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Review, Sci-Fi

The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (2025) – What’s Up Doc?

Released: 27th March
Seen: 29th March

The Day The Earth Blew Up

David Zaslav is probably one of the worst executives any movie studio has ever had to suffer under, at least in my opinion. Sure, there are many morally worse than him and some who should probably just die in prison for what they have done. However, in terms of how they have abused their stature in the industry to destroy the art of others, few are as reviled as Zaslav. The man runs Warner Brothers and yet seems to hate anything to do with animation, notably removing large amounts of historic Looney Tunes cartoons from the studio’s streaming service and infamously cancelling the completed film Coyote VS Acme. It honestly has started to feel like the man in charge of one of the most legendary animation IP brands of all time was going to kill it through sheer incompetence as a studio head… but fortunately for us, one slipped through his slimy fingers and made it out into the world and it’s one of the best animated films in recent memory.

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leebutler Action, Comedy, Fantasy, Review, Sci-Fi

Mickey 17 (2025) – Hey Mickey

Released: 6th March
Seen: 23rd March

Mickey 17 Info Image Directed and Written By - Bong Joon Ho Starring - Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo, Toni Collette, Steven Yeun

In 2020, the Oscars did something genuinely cool. For the first time in the history of the ceremony, a non-English language film won Best Picture, a moment that might be the last actually good thing to happen in 2020. The film in question, Parasite, took home four awards that night for Screenplay, Directing, International film and Best Picture. The director, Bong Joon ho, instantly became a major player and whatever film he made after Parasite was going to be a big deal so we all waited for over half a decade for his next big feature film. That film has finally come out after half a decade and as expected, Bong Joon Ho has delivered something truly spectacular in his latest work, Mickey 17.

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The Electric State Header Image
leebutler Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Netflix, Review, Sci-Fi

The Electric State (2025) – Shockingly Bland

Released: 14th March
Seen: 16th March 

In the last few decades, filmmaking has gotten more expensive. It was not that long ago that the idea of spending even $50 million on a single film sounded insane, now you’re lucky to find a film that costs under $100 million that isn’t an indie film. According to Wikipedia, there are 89 films that (adjusted for inflation) cost over $200 million and only six of those films are pre-2000. This is a crisis state that’s setting up films to fail and put hardworking filmmakers out of jobs and it doesn’t help when a film that costs $320 million to produce is as meaningless and forgettable and undoubtedly financially devastating as The Electric State.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

Captain America: Brave New World (2025) – Brave And The Bold Choice

Released: 13th February
Seen: 16th February

In 2018, Thanos snapped his fingers and destroyed half of the universe. By doing so, he simultaneously created a point we could mark as the peak of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With the gift of time, we can pretty much state that Phase Three (AKA the era between Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Far From Home) has been the best phase of the MCU, but its absolute peak can pretty much be pinpointed to Infinity War and Endgame, two films that felt like the end of a cinematic crescendo that had been building for a decade up to that point. They were great movies, truly proof of what this genre could be like at its absolute best and probably one of the dumbest moves that Marvel made in terms of story because the problem is that once you hit a high like that, what happens afterwards?

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leebutler Horror, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Alien: Romulus (2024) – Shocker

Released: 16th August 2024
Seen: 9th February 2025

Alien Romulus Info

2017 is the last year that we had a new instalment of the Alien franchise, a film that made about 250 million worldwide but didn’t get the best critical reception. It still made money and still had its fans (I counted myself among them at the time of its release) so it was almost inevitable that we would get another sequel where another group of people would happen upon a xenomorph colony and get their shit fucked up by the iconic acid-blooded creatures. Sure enough last year we got such a film with Alien: Romulus, the 7th entry in the long-running franchise which dared to ask the question “What if a bunch of people found the original ship from Alien and there were still aliens on it who would like to face fuck them all to death?”.., an important question that the film deftly answers.

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Netflix, Review, Sci-Fi

Vengeance Most Fowl (2025) – Splendid

Released: 3rd January
Seen: 5th January

Wallace & Gromit Vengeance Most Fowl INformation

In 1989 the world was introduced to a lovable cheese-obsessed inventor named Wallace and his silent sentient super-smart dog named Gromit in the Oscar-nominated short film A Grand Adventure. Little did anyone know at the time that they had created a pair of cultural icons who would go on to be a major part of British pop culture for the next 35 years and counting. The charming little claymation characters and their somehow both subdued and wacky adventures would end up being the stars of a well known trilogy of shorts that included The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave (the last two getting Oscars) and eventually made their way to the big screen with the 2005 film The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. It’s been almost 20 years since then and apart from one more short it’s been very quiet for Wallace & Gromit but now they’re back with their new film Vengeance Most Fowl and once again they’ve proven that charm and a little bit of clay is a match made in heaven.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Comedy, Review, Sci-Fi

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) – Timely

Released: 25th July
Seen: 27th July

Six years ago, a little independent film called Deadpool 2 was released to cinemas, doing incredible business and cementing the legendary Merc with the Mouth as an iconic addition to the superhero genre. I know it feels like an absolute eternity since 2018, it was a different time before a plague basically upended our world and changed absolutely everything but you have to remember that 2018-2019 was probably the peak era of the modern Superhero genre, culminating in the cataclysmic cinematic event known as Avengers: Infinity War, followed a year later by Avengers: Endgame. Looking back with the gift of hindsight, Endgame marked the point where the superhero genre peaked and it’s probably never going to be that great again but at the time it felt like there would be no end and surely the next big thing would be another Deadpool movie. Surely it would be, Deadpool 2 was the 5th highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office, it was so popular they re-released it with new footage to make a Christmas movie, surely this meant that we’d get another run around with the funny red menace.

…then the plague happened, no one wanted to go to the movies anymore and Superhero films entered a slump. 

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) – Action Packed Glory

Released: 11th January
Seen: 26th April

In 2015 George Miller returned to the franchise that began his career after a 30-year break and gave us Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that many would argue (and be completely right to do so) was the best action film of the 2010s. A high-octane explosion-filled joyride through the desert, Mad Max: Fury Road revived a long-dead Ozploitation franchise and took it to Hollywood where it reminded the world that the guy who made the two Happy Feet movies used to be an absolute madman who made films where cars explode just for the fucking fun of it. What was a big surprise back then was that the standout character in the Mad Max movie wasn’t Max but a side character named Furiosa who became an instant classic character who people wanted to know more about. It might’ve taken nearly a decade but Miller has heard our cries and given us the glory that is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

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