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

Project Hail Mary (2026) – Rocks

Released: 19th March
Seen: 1st July

One of the most beloved stories that cinema keeps going back to is “Man interacts with aliens”. It’s a time-tested story that allows for so many variations, from the whimsical wonder of ET to the nightmarish horror of The Thing, cinema has run the gamut of ways to show a human having to deal with a creature from another planet, figure out how to communicate with said creature and either save or destroy it. It’s been done so many times that we’re almost out of new alien designs that we can use before repeating ourselves. So one would think that another film about a human going to space and spending the entire time interacting with an alien would feel at least a little rote, a little repetitive… somehow, Project Hail Mary manages to feel fresh while also being charming as all hell.

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

Supergirl (2026) – Averagegirl

Released: 25th June
Seen: 25th June

Roughly one year ago, Superman returned to us. After the absolute disaster that was the DCU, we were given a Superman who cares and there was much rejoicing. It was a genuinely charming movie with one of the best Superman actors we’ve had since the Christopher Reeve-era and I do not say that lightly. I named that film the second best film of 2025 and the performance of Superman was my third favourite performance in that same year. It was a genuinely great work of art that showed that there was space in the modern era for a kinder sweeter Superman. The ending of that film had a brief moment for Supergirl (Milly Alcock) who came to collect her dog Krypto and showed that this universe’s Supergirl was a bit of a drunken disaster who we would eventually get to spend an entire movie following. It was exciting, it seemed like it should be fun and now that film has come out and… it’s OK, it’s a genuinely OK movie but it should be so much better than OK.

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

Hoppers (2026) – Golden Beaver

Released: 26th March
Seen: 20th June

One of the big problems that people have with the modern film landscape is that it feels like most movies that make it to cinemas have to either be based on a pre-existing IP (book, TV show, Reddit story that inexplicably gets popular) or a sequel to a film that was a previous hit. This seems to be reflected in the box office, if you look at this year’s top 10 highest grossing films you’ll see sequels, movies based on books and even a film that heavily utilises the IP of one of the biggest popstars of all time. There are only 2 films in the top 10 highest-grossing films of 2026 (at the time of writing this review) that are not based on some already existing property. The first is the megahit Obsession which exploded due to great word of mouth and the other is the subject of this review, Pixar’s first big film of this year, Hoppers.

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy

Toy Story 5 (2026) – Technically Brilliant

Released: 18th June
Seen: 19th June

The Toy Story franchise feels like a miracle at this point, it’s certainly a franchise that goes past any reasonable explanation in terms of quality. The first film was basically a test to see if you could even make a full-length feature film using CGI characters and make it interesting, it went on to be the second-highest-grossing film of 1995 (I know, I feel old too just realising it’s been 31 years) and effectively killed the hand-drawn animation genre. Toy Story 2 was almost deleted by accident and intended to go straight to DVD, it ended up as the third highest-grossing film of 1999 and is widely considered as good as, or better than the original. Toy Story 3 came out nearly a decade later in 2010, had a six-year production period and seemingly closed the story out. It would go on to make a billion dollars, be the highest-grossing film of that year and finally win this franchise the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Then in 2019 came Toy Story 4, a film that many people doubted because the story was finished pretty perfectly in part three but it proved us wrong, creating another nearly perfect movie that again made a billion dollars and won this franchise its second Best Animated Feature Oscar. It’s kind of wild just realizing that this franchise has somehow produced four absolute classics of the genre and keeps finding new ways to delight young audiences with its story about a bunch of toys that come to life whenever you aren’t looking… Well, looks like we’re gonna have to make that five absolute classics because the bastards did it again.

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leebutler Adventure, Horror, Review, Thriller

Send Help (2026) – Outwits, Outlasts, Outplays

Released: 29th January
Seen: 13th May

In the year 2000, the world was introduced to a reality show that would go on to effectively change history. Survivor, now in its 50th season, took a bunch of random people and dumped them on an island with nothing but their wits and tasked them with surviving for 39 days to try and win a million-dollar prize. It was a monster hit, revolutionised TV as we know it, effectively turned reality TV into the genre we know today and made producer Mark Burnett into such a massive figure that he was able to get another show off the ground, The Apprentice. Speaking of things that start with getting trapped on a desert island and end in unnecessary death, carnage and projectile vomiting, Send Help is a pretty great movie.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy

How To Train Your Dragon (2025) – Reproduction

Released: 12th June
Seen: 16th December

In 1998, Gus Van Sant remade Psycho. He had just come off the monster hit that was Good Will Hunting and used the reputation he had built to get Universal to foot the bill. The remake is infamous, a largely shot-for-shot remake that puts the film in colour and uses modern actors while replicating the original visual style as much as possible. The idea was to basically make fun of remakes, to show how it’s truly impossible to copy a film exactly as it originally was and have the same impact. That film definitely proved Gus Van Sant’s point because his remake of Psycho was a box office bomb and a critical punching bag. One would hope that maybe Gus’ experiment would’ve stopped others from trying to do the same thing again but no, we’ve lately been inundated with remakes of classic Disney films and now How To Train Your Dragon gets the same treatment and while it might be better than Psycho (1998), that doesn’t mean it deserves to exist.

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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 Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Crime, Family, Mystery, Review

Zootopia 2 (2025) – Sssensational

Released: 27th November
Seen: 8th December

In 2016, Disney released Zootopia, which told the story of a society made entirely of animals (as in lions, tigers, bears, oh my) that was dealing with the disappearance of the predator class of animals. A buddy cop mystery movie told with just a ton of adorable animals in people clothes was basically a license to print money for Disney, which would rake in over a billion dollars from this one movie alone, and that still only made it the 4th highest-grossing movie of the year, which really says a lot about how insane the box office was only a decade ago. In the years since Zootopia has remained a very popular property, even getting a TV show on Disney+ in 2022, but it’s taken until now for Disney to get around to making a sequel, and it was absolutely worth the wait.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

Tron: Ares (2025) – …loading

Released: 9th October
Seen: 18th October

In 1982, Disney released the movie Tron and to say it was a revelation is an understatement. Tron is the kind of film where they had to invent technology to figure out how to make it, keep in mind this was before CGI animation was even possible in any real capacity. The computers used to make Tron didn’t even have one-tenth of the power of the phone you are probably reading this on. It was revolutionary, a display of what a computer could bring to the world of cinema and even though it still made back its money ($50 million on a $17 million budget) it has been considered mostly a cult film and thus wasn’t really given a sequel treatment. Well, a combination of that and the fact that the animation department would’ve murdered someone if they had to go through that process again. A sequel would have to wait until the computers could handle the job, which is how we got Tron: Legacy in 2010. It was a fine movie, visually spectacular (besides the de-aging that they did to Jeff Daniels) and made a ton of money… and for some reason it took 15 years for them to try again with Tron: Ares.

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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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