leebutler Action, Comedy, Review

Stop! That! Train! (2026) – Ai Ai Captain!

Released: 13th August
Seen: 22nd September

February 2nd, 2009. That was the date that the first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race aired on TV. At the time, it was almost a non-entity; it was effectively shot in the spare room at World of Wonder with a cast of Drag Queens no one had heard of, with a grand prize of 20K and some makeup and it aired on LogoTV. If you told anyone that this show would go on for 18 seasons, have a yearly All Stars spinoff, be franchised around the world and create superstars who would end up making world tours, appearing on multiple major TV shows and headlining Broadway, you would be insane, but that’s what happened. Drag Race gradually became a phenomenon, growing in scale to an absolutely insane degree that a feature film of some kind that utilised this talent pool was inevitable. With hundreds of drag queens who have proven just how insanely talented they are at World of Wonder’s disposal, it would be absolutely insane if they didn’t, at some point, try to use that talent pool to make a feature film and with Stop! That! Train! it feels like they’ve managed to figure out exactly what to do with the talent they have available because they made something that’s honestly better than it has any right being.

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leebutler Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Review

Coyote VS ACME (2026) – Miraculous

Released: 17th September
Seen: 17th September

If everything had gone according to the plans of the cinematic terrorist known as David Zaslav, this piece of art would’ve been thrown into a fire, and he would’ve been able to write off about 30 million in taxes for the Warner Brothers company. That was the plan; that was what the finish line for this film was going to be. It must be pointed out that films die all the time; they get stuck in development hell, or some disaster happens so that the people who started the film can’t complete it, or they finish the film but the company that made it goes bankrupt so the film can’t legally be released. A film being made but not being released is not an uncommon event; what is uncommon is a company making a film, getting great test screenings, and then deciding not to release it for a tax write-off that wouldn’t even cover two months of the CEO’s total salary package. What’s even less common is a film that went through this process to then get bought up by a competitor who actually releases the film into cinemas. That alone should make everyone want to support Coyote VS ACME purely as a middle finger to the absolutely brainless moron who thinks his minuscule tax break is somehow more important than a work of art that people gave up time in their precious lives to create. It also helps that Coyote VS ACME is, and boy does it feel good to say this, one of the best goddamn films of the year.

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leebutler Drama, Music, Review, Thriller

Mother Mary (2026) – Mother!

Released: 14th May
Seen: 9th September

When it comes to pop music, the genre largely belongs to women, and they manage to turn that light, fluffy, fun music into an absolute art form. From early icons like Madonna and Cher, to the 90s icons of Brittney Spears and Christina Aguilera, to the millennial iterations of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, all the way up to the modern pop princesses like Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, every generation gets a pop girlie or two that they can latch onto and call their own. They are often expected to give the world grand, elaborate performances to provide their bright bubblegum music a touch of heft; any deeper meaning or impact of their music often has to wait a few years for people to reevaluate it, and any mental anguish they may go through while being a pop icon is pushed down, hidden for people to find out about in tabloids years later. Witnessing a pop icon in trouble is almost a rite of passage, and Mother Mary gives us a pop icon going through the wringer and it really does work… until the ghosts show up.

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leebutler Comedy, Drama, Music, Musical, Review

Power Ballad (2026) – Charming

Released: 28th May
Seen: 8th September

It’s an undeniable truth that all music artists are influenced by other artists. All boy bands want to be The Beatles, all male artists are trying to steal some of Elvis’ swagger (and Elvis was just stealing from any black musician he knew of) and pretty much any modern female pop artist wants to be Madonna. It’s not hard to spot this, the entire music industry is built on people who are influenced by other artists and trying to express that influence in a way that doesn’t get them sued for copyright infringement. This is why you’ll see a lot of strange people getting writing credits on major songs, it’s weird that Right Said Fred are credited on a Taylor Swift song but she used the beat of their song I’m Too Sexy in her song Look What You Made Me Do so she has to give them credit… but what if she didn’t? What if a major artist just took a song from a struggling, lesser-known artist and just never gave them credit? Well, that would be the basic plot to the movie Power Ballad which has got its moments, but not as many as it should.

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leebutler Drama, Horror, Review, Sci-Fi

Saccharine (2026) – Sweetish

Released: 4th June
Seen: 23rd August

There is a term that is slowly becoming a little more well-known thanks to the invention of Ozempic and similar GLP-1 weight loss drugs known as Food Noise. The idea of food noise is just that someone is constantly thinking about food, even after they’ve eaten a meal and should rationally no longer be hungry. A lot of overweight people (myself included) know this noise well, as it’s that constant thinking of what to eat next that can become debilitating at times and is a phenomenon that’s finally starting to be talked about. Of course, it’s also inevitable that it can be taken and turned into the subject of a movie and it seems like the film Saccharine has decided to play around with the horror of such an idea, but in doing so appears to have bitten off a little more than it can chew.

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leebutler Comedy, Drama, Review, Romance

One Night Only (2026) – Celibate

Released: 6th August
Seen: 13th August

The year is 2013, and James DeMonaco makes his feature-length directorial debut with a film called The Purge. This is a big deal for James, because up to this point in his career James has mostly been a scriptwriter who got his start writing the script for Jack (that Robin Williams film about the boy who ages weirdly) but wasn’t really known for anything that special. He worked, certainly, but didn’t really get to make his mark. The Purge movie was going to make his mark; he wrote and directed it, got Ethan Hawke to star in his little low-budget horror film about a world where all crime, including murder, was legal for one night only; things were going well. Hell, the film made money, nearly 90 million on a 3 million budget. Everything should be going great… Unfortunately, the film got slaughtered in reviews.

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leebutler Drama, Horror, Review, Romance, Sci-Fi

The Bride! (2026) – Marital Bliss

Released: 6th March
Seen: 10th August

Mary Shelley was, essentially, the inventor of modern science fiction with her 1818 novel Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. This single 280-page book about a mad scientist deciding to dig up a bunch of corpses and sew them together to create the perfect man was an absolute revolution and would eventually go on to be the basis for another important work of art, that being the 1931 feature film Frankenstein. That film was, and still is, an absolute benchmark of horror cinema that everyone has referenced at some point and was one of the top earning films of the year when it came out, making 12 million at the box office (adjusted for inflation, that’s about 263 million today). It was big enough that director James Whale was basically begged to make a sequel which brought us The Bride of Frankenstein which is iconic in a very different way from the film that went before it (It’s campier and so much gayer, because why not?). That would inevitably lead to a string of sequels, remakes, reimaginings, recontextualisations and eventually would lead to Maggie Gyllenhaal taking a swing at the idea and giving us The Bride!, a striking modern take on the eternal classic.

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leebutler Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Undertone (2026) – Underdone

Released: 25th July
Seen: 9th August

In 1927, the film The Jazz Singer came out and changed the world. While it was possibly the first film to use sound (depending on how we want to define it there are several candidates for the first sound picture), it was certainly the first to be popular and to allow the use of audible dialogue, and so, with the simple line “You ain’t heard nothing yet”, that film entered the history of cinema as an important benchmark (even though that benchmark comes with a notable history of racism… but so does most early cinema, let’s be honest). Since then, sound has been an essential element of the cinematic experience; it can make or break a film. There are countless stories of films that were deemed to be bad because they didn’t have the soundtrack completed yet, a bad sound mix can make a serious scene into an accidental comedy, there’s an absolutely hilarious version of the trailer for The Mummy that muted the wrong audio track which became the only interesting thing about that movie. Sound is important and so when a horror film sells itself on its sound by saying it’s the scariest movie you’ll ever hear you hope that it can deliver on that… in the cast of Undertone, it sounds good but I’ve heard scarier.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026) – Evil Dead Wrap

Released: 16th April
Seen: 7th August

In 2023, Evil Dead Rise was released and became a smash hit. It absolutely dominated the box office with $147 million, got rave reviews from the critics and has possibly the most badass title card reveal that audiences have seen for a very long time. It was the kind of film where the person who made it would be undoubtedly heralded as a potential horror legend and basically guaranteed that they’d be able to make any film they would ever want to make in this specific genre. Therefore, it really shouldn’t be a shock that the next film by writer/director Lee Cronin would not only be one where he’s not held back by studio notes but one where he’s so clearly in charge that they have to put his name in the title… Now, if only Lee Cronin’s The Mummy were actually about The Mummy.

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leebutler Horror, Review

Whistle (2026) – Hot Air

Released: 12th February
Seen: 5th August

A good old horror movie staple is the cursed object, something that’s been imbued with evil magic that causes death. The Monkey’s Paw, a tape that makes you die in 7 days, a One Wish Willow – simple everyday items that result in horrific deaths for anyone who happens upon them. This can often make for some truly great horror stories that not only shock the audience but also feel somewhat relatable; everyone at some point has picked up a random item and fiddled with it, so the idea of happening upon a cursed item and accidentally triggering its curse is weirdly believable. Sometimes it can lead to great movies, but often it’ll lead to films that’re just kind of OK, like the film Whistle, a film that doesn’t even have the decency to actually blow and give me an easy pun to make.

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