FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

While it's easy to pile on a movie that takes massive swings and occasionally stumbles, looking at it now reveals something far more interesting than the internet consensus gives it credit for. This is a completely different tone for Shyamalan, stepping away from the grounded, Hitchcockian thrillers and twist-driven suspense movies that made his name. Instead, it's a director stretching far outside his usual comfort zone into massive, high-fantasy world-building. Even when the ambitious machinery doesn't fully click into place, the sheer audacity of the attempt makes it fascinating to revisit on physical media. If you're coming back to the story after all these years, the plot crams the entire twenty-episode first season of Nickelodeon's beloved animated series into a brisk 103 minutes. The world is split into four distinct nations tied to the elements: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. For a full century, the Fire Nation has waged a relentless war against the rest of th...

What happens when a massive animated universe tries to make the leap to a standalone movie, only to get yanked into the streaming-first trenches at the eleventh hour? Paramount's Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender (the one with the older, young-adult Gaang voiced by Eric Nam and company) brings with it all the baggage of a project that went through a corporate pivot before landing on home video. For years, fans watched the release dates shuffle around while executives tried to figure out whether theatrical animation still made financial sense, eventually watching it get rerouted to Paramount+ before finding its way onto a physical shelf. If you are looking at picking this up on Blu-ray, you are likely wondering if the transition from episodic television to a feature-length story actually works, or if it feels like an oversized TV special. It is a fair question, especially because Avatar has always been a franchise built on slow-burn momentum rather than quick hits. Studio Mir handl...

Rewatching The Lovely Bones on 4K Blu-ray feels like opening a time capsule from 2009 that nobody quite knew what to do with at the time. Peter Jackson was coming off the back-to-back juggernauts of The Lord of the Rings and King Kong, and instead of taking another massive action swing, he adapted Alice Sebold's bestselling novel about a murdered teenage girl watching her family fall apart from the afterlife. It's a weird, tonally jagged movie. Half of it is a grimy, agonizingly tense suburban thriller, and the other half is an aggressively saturated CGI fever dream. Watching the 4K disc now, the movie still doesn't totally work as a cohesive story, but it doesn't need to; that's the part I missed the first time around. The two halves of the film fight each other for two hours, and I'm starting to see that may have been the point. If you haven't revisited it since high school or whenever it was constantly playing on cable, the setup is pretty grim. It's ...

  Horror fans can add a tense new title to their collections today as Lionsgate officially releases visionary director Alexandre Aja’s psychological horror-thriller Never Let Go on 4K Ultra HD. Written by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby, the film is led by Academy Award winner Halle Berry alongside an ensemble cast featuring Percy Daggs IV, Anthony B. Jenkins, William Catlett, Matthew Kevin Anderson, and Christin Park. Set in an isolated home cut off from an encroaching terror, the story follows a fiercely protective mother and her twin sons as an unspeakable evil overtakes the world beyond their front doorstep. With their house and unbreakable family bond serving as their sole sanctuary, the trio must remain physically connected at all times, tethering themselves together with ropes whenever they venture outside. Their fragile safety net begins to unravel when one of the boys questions if the evil is truly real, severing the ties that bind them and plunging the family into a terrifyi...

Mid-2000s horror had a specific visual and narrative signature, a mix of high-contrast, sun-baked textures, subverted teen archetypes, and late-night cable grit. Jonathan Levine’s feature directorial debut, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006), remains one of the more interesting time capsules of that era. After years of navigating tricky distribution and rights issues, the film is officially arriving on Blu-ray and Digital on December 15 as spine #42 in Lionsgate’s Vestron Video Collector’s Series. The release carries a suggested retail price of $27.99 and presents the 90-minute cult slasher on a single Blu-ray disc formatted in widescreen (2.40:1) with English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio™ and English SDH subtitles. The Film Written by Jacob Forman and produced by Chad Feehan, Felipe Marino, and Joe Neurauter, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane centers on Mandy (Amber Heard), an outsider who returns for a new school year having grown up over the summer. When she joins a group of classmates for...

Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) endures not only as a bitingly caustic indictment of the modern world, but also as a poignant commentary on the loneliness of the outsider. Featuring a startling and era-defining lead performance from David Bowie in his feature debut, the film remains an iconic odyssey in 1970s science fiction cinema.  Ahead of its milestone 50th anniversary, Lionsgate is releasing a new 2-disc 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Collector’s Edition SteelBook on December 15 for $42.99 MSRP . The Film Adapted by screenwriter Paul Mayersberg from Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth follows Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie), a humanoid alien who arrives on Earth during a catastrophic drought on his home planet. Newton's mission is straightforward yet perilous: transport Earth’s water resources back to his dying world. To fund his massive aerospace endeavor, Newton uses his advanced alien technology to launch World Enterprises Corpo...

Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Maynard, and today we're talking with director Jordan Downey about his new movie, The Cycle, which is currently streaming on Shudder. Before we jump into the episode, a quick heads-up: The Cycle is streaming right now on Shudder, and it works best if you go into it knowing as little as possible. If you haven't watched it yet, pause this episode, go put it on, and come back when the credits roll. We're going to dive into details you'll want to see for yourself first. Ok your back; spoilers ahead, you’ve been warned…  On paper, it sounds like a classic procedural: forensic anthropologist Meg, played by Deborah Ann Woll, gets brought in to help investigate a gruesome double murder along the coast. But things get bizarre fast when they find a third body preserved at the scene, and it turns out to be her estranged father who went missing 36 years ago. Once Meg gets him on the autopsy table, she starts find...

If your holiday movie rotation is feeling a bit tired this year, Toy Robot is shaking things up with three cult favorites hitting 4K UHD this December. Whether you want high-altitude action, gritty detective work, or teenagers losing their minds over KISS, there is something here worth clearing space on the shelf for. Things kick off on December 8 with the absolute classic Passenger 57. Wesley Snipes plays John Cutter, a former cop teaching anti-terrorism to flight crews who ends up trapped on a commercial flight hijacked by Bruce Payne's ice-cold villain. It is fast, loud, and peak 90s action with Elizabeth Hurley and Tom Sizemore along for the chaotic ride. Both the 4K and Blu-ray discs feature a fresh 4K restoration straight from the original camera negative, plus brand-new interviews. Dropping on that exact same day is Burt Reynolds' hard-boiled neo-noir thriller Sharky's Machine. Reynolds directed and starred as a demoted narcotics detective stuck working vice in Atlan...

TRAUMA OR, MONSTERS ALL, the highly anticipated new feature from acclaimed independent horror auteur Larry Fessenden, is opening in theaters today. Kicking off with runs at the IFC Center in New York and the Lumiere Music Hall in Los Angeles before expanding into additional markets. Produced by Glass Eye Pix, TRAUMA OR, MONSTERS ALL serves as the grand culmination of Fessenden’s decades-long project of reinterpreting classic Universal horror lore. The film weaves together the iconic creatures from his previous works—the vampire from Habit, Frankenstein’s monster from Depraved, and the werewolf from Blackout into a single, haunting contemporary narrative. The release marks the latest chapter in a nearly two-decade creative partnership between Dark Sky Films and Glass Eye Pix. Their long-standing collaboration has yielded some of modern independent horror's most celebrated titles, including Ti West's The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, as well as genre pillars such as Stak...

Middle-earth enthusiasts and physical media collectors have a big reason to celebrate as Amazon MGM Studios announces that Seasons 1 and 2 of the hit fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are heading to home video formats. Fans can bring the high-fantasy adventure home on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD starting November 3. Set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, this epic drama follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil in Middle-earth. The sprawling narrative spans the rich geography of Tolkien's world, taking viewers from the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains to the majestic forests of the elf-capital Lindon, and from the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor to the furthest uncharted reaches of the map as these kingdoms carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone. Helmed by showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay along...