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 Comedy, Review

Oh. What. Fun. (2025) – Meh, Humbug

Released: 3rd December
Seen: 13th December

Oh. What. Fun. opens with a voiceover by the main character lamenting that the history of Christmas movies ignores the hard work of the mother and to be fair, it’s got a pretty good point. For all the work that they do around the Holidays, there are more films about husbands and kids desperately trying to make it home than there are about mums in general. Any film about Christmas will focus on the husband or eldest son, relegating the mother to a supporting role. This is emblematic of a general problem in Hollywood that not only lacks a lot of good roles for women but is especially bad for women over the age of 40. With an opening like that, one would hope that maybe Oh. What. Fun. might have something about it that could really show off what a good female role would look like… instead it makes me consider cancelling Christmas.

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leebutler Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Review, Thriller

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) – Miraculous

Released: 12th December
Seen: 12th December

In 2019, Rian Johnson released Knives Out to an unsuspecting public, and the world embraced and fell in love with his all-star cast and murder mystery. It was a true masterpiece, a definitive work in the murder mystery genre that had people salivating for more. That’s when Netflix did one of the few truly cool things that they’ve done in a long time and gave Rian Johnson 400 million dollars to make two new entries in the franchise, the first one of those was Glass Onion in 2022, which was also absolutely brilliant and proved that Knives Out had genuine franchise potential. Now we’ve been blessed with Wake Up Dead Man, the third movie in the Knives Out Franchise, and I’m fully at the point of insisting that Rian Johnson continue making these films until either he or Daniel Craig is no longer with us, because once again he’s made an actual masterpiece.

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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 Comedy, Review

The Roses (2025) – Thorny Fun

Released: 28th August
Seen: 6th December

In 1981, William Adler released his eighth novel, The War Of The Roses, about a couple who slowly feel their marriage falling apart and go through an absurdly horrific divorce. This story got adapted into a film of the same name in 1989 which was a massive hit, making $160 million on a $26 million budget. As a pitch black comedy, the chances of it being remade probably seemed unlikely (remaking comedies is rare enough, remaking pitch black comedies about couples who divorce and almost torture each other to death is something that was almost never going to happen) but here we are in 2025 with The Roses coming out and honestly being funnier than you might expect it to be.

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leebutler Action, Comedy, Review

Fight or Flight (2025) – Gloriously Silly

Released: 4th September
Seen: 1st December

In 2022, a little film called Bullet Train came out that asked the logical question, “What would happen if you put Brad Pitt on a Japanese bullet train full of assassins?” The answer was a pretty fun movie with a lot of wild over-the-top cartoon characters, a lot of inventive action scenes with stunts by a guy who did a lot of Marvel work and the director of Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2. It was the kind of film that was just balls to the wall fun, at times those balls made their way through the wall because they were slammed against it with such velocity. It was also a pretty big hit, and like a lot of big hits, it’s almost required for someone to try and make a knockoff version of it. Enter Fight or Flight, which takes Brad Pitt and replaces him with Josh Hartnett and jams some wings on the train to turn it into a plane. With that, you have another pretty damn fun movie.

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leebutler Action, Comedy

Playdate (2025) – Detention

Released: 12th November
Seen: 30th November

Sometimes a film just rubs you the wrong way and it’s really hard to explain why. Sometimes there is just something about the tone and performances in any given film that, for some reason, triggers something deep in the hate-filled portion of your brain that makes you want to scream in anger and yet it’s hard to fully pinpoint what it is about that film that gets you going. This is a problem for someone reviewing a film that has this kind of issue happen because the entire point of a review is to pinpoint what exactly it is about a film that does or doesn’t work and explain that in a way that can be understood… but here we are, Playdate just seemed to rub me the wrong way and now I’m going to spend the better part of a few paragraphs trying to put my finger on what its problem is because “It sucks” is just not good enough an explanation, even though it does absolutely suck.

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leebutler Comedy, Crime, Review, Thriller

Caught Stealing (2025) – Steals The Show

Released: 28th August
Seen: 30th November

Darren Aronofsky is the kind of director who seems to revel in polarising the audience, in making a film that’s going to get an extreme reaction no matter if it’s positive or negative. There aren’t really any films in his catalogue you could say are just good or well-liked; you either love his stuff or hate it. In recent years, even though I’ll admit he’s obscenely talented, I just wasn’t into his work on films like Mother! Or The Whale, but in the past, he’s delivered truly breathtaking work like Black Swan so undoubtedly there was a chance that he was going to win me back at some point with one of his works. It feels like Caught Stealing seems to be the first time that Darren has tried to make a film with a strong mass appeal (hilarious to say in retrospect since it bombed at the box office), and honestly, it’s just a damn good time.

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leebutler Action, Comedy, Crime, Review, Thriller

Nobody 2 (2025) – Fun

Released: 17th October
Seen: 29th November

In 2021, a little film called Nobody was released to the public. The film could be basically described as a mass-appeal suburban version of John Wick, filled with some truly incredible action sequences, a captivating lead performance by Bob Odenkirk and enough charm to elevate the already excellent material. It was a genuinely glorious little film that easily was one of the best of 2021 (and while being a good film in 2021 was a low bar because of how that year was still a pandemic recovery year for the movies, believe me when I say that Nobody was still genuinely fantastic). It was the kind of film that seemed like it was destined to be a franchise and deserved a sequel just to see what this little family did now that their father’s clandestine history had been revealed. Well, in Nobody 2, the Mansell family decide that the way they’re going to handle things is by going on a summer vacation… it will go exactly as expected.

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