leebutler Editorial

Best Performances of 2024

Every year it’s remarkable how much a good performance can salvage a film. Your film can be a boring waste of time but a single great performance can make it worth watching. Every year film nerds love guessing who is going to be given the awards for Acting, those of us into horror are often left disappointed because our faves don’t win, but lists like this let us throw a tiny bit of praise out into the void and so that’s what we’re going to do here.

In normal years this list would be 20 entries long but this isn’t a normal year, I didn’t see my normal amount of films so this is only going to be 10 entries long but god damn are these some memorable entries. 1 entry per film, no honourable mentions this time, here we go.

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leebutler Horror, Review, Thriller

Heretic (2024) – GOD DAMN!

Released: 11th October
Seen: 21st November

“The only thing less trustworthy than a man who questions his faith is a man who does not”

~  Pope Leo XIV

The question of faith is perhaps the most personal question that one could ever be asked. What you believe happens when you shuffle off the great perch that is life is something that has puzzled people for centuries and has inspired art since the moment we worked out that if you mixed some dirt and water you could make a pretty picture out of it. Faith is also incredibly powerful when used in Horror films, as evidenced by the classic horror film The Exorcist. Of course, the Exorcist looked at the ideas of religion and faith and came down pretty hard on the side of “Yes there is a God and a Devil and you need God to help kick the Devil in the dick”. What about the idea of questioning faith? What about using doubt to help create horror… well, Heretic is here to do exactly that and it does so with glorious aplomb. 

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leebutler Uncategorized

Best Performances of 2020

2020 has been the year of never ending badness, that would be the mildest statement one could make about this year. In general, it’s been a total shitshow with very few moments of happiness… so this year seems like a perfect time to start a new tradition on this blog, because why the hell not? It means I have fresh New Year’s content and that’s always nice to have fresh content so this is me saying what I felt the best performances of the year were.

Well, I say “Best” but much like with the best films of the year list, ‘BEST” in this context really means “Performances that I liked the most”. Maybe they weren’t in the best films, some of them might actually be in pretty bad films, but they’re the kind of performances that make you want to watch any film… and this is a top 20, because it’s my blog and I can do that sort of thing!

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leebutler Uncategorized

Death to 2020 (2020) – KILL IT WITH FIRE

Released: 27th December
Seen: 27th December

2020… this year can hurry up and die at any moment. Seriously, the actual year itself could just fall over, scream “Help, I can’t get up” and we can all just kick it to death. Here’s how awful this year was, Charlie Brooker decided to not bother doing a season of his depression porno Black Mirror (which is one of the best shows with one of the best pilots, more pilots should include world leaders having sex with farm animals) because he didn’t want to make us feel even worse. Instead he decided to make a mockumentary titled Death to 2020, very much in the style of his Wipe series where he would comment on the major events of the year and god it feels cathartic to see the year getting the punching it deserves.

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leebutler Uncategorized

The Gentlemen (2020) – Bring It On Lads

Released: 1st January
Seen: 2nd January

For several years now, Guy Ritchie has been trying to spread out from the English crime drama/comedy films that he made his name on. Most recently he tried to take some of the elements from his old crime drama films and put them in the criminally underrated King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. He then made the just flat out criminally bad Aladdin movie and maybe those films shook him a little since people were starting to catch onto his bag of tricks and calling them out. Whatever happened with those two films, Guy Ritchie seemed to go back to what he does best… an English crime drama/comedy with a large eclectic cast of characters who drop obscenities like they were forms of punctuation. Thank goodness because this is probably the kind of film Guy Ritchie was born to make because he does it so well.

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