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John Carney basically spends his entire career remaking the exact same movie, but I cannot bring myself to be mad at him for it. Once was the raw, lo-fi version. Begin Again was the bloated Hollywood version with Keira Knightley and Adam Levine trying way too hard. Then in 2016 he hit the exact sweet spot with Sing Street, a film that takes the dreary, soul-crushing grey of 1985 Dublin and injects it with a lethal dose of cheap hair gel and synth-pop. It is a movie about being fifteen, broke, and so stupidly desperate to impress a cool girl that you accidentally form a surprisingly decent new wave band. The setup is aggressively familiar if you grew up in a house where money was a taboo subject people screamed about behind closed doors. Conor, played by Ferdia Walsh-Peelo in a performance that hits the exact right notes of teenage awkwardness, is watching his parents' marriage fall apart in real time. The Irish economy in the mid-eighties is in the toilet, so to save cash, his pare...

NEON has released the first teaser trailer for Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, offering a neon-soaked look at prolific Japanese auteur Takashi Miike’s entry into the cult crime franchise. The film serves as a standalone sequel to Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Abel Ferrara’s 1992 original Bad Lieutenant. Reuniting Miike with screenwriter Daisuke Tengan, the thriller plunges viewers into Tokyo's corrupt neo-noir underworld. The film stars Shun Oguri as a disgraced Tokyo police officer and compulsive gambler whose spiral into corruption and addiction catches up with him. His chaotic life collides with a high-profile case when a mysterious FBI agent (Lily James) arrives in Japan to investigate the disappearance of a prominent politician's daughter (Liv Morgan). As the duo navigates a maze of local corruption and a vengeful ex-yakuza, a sadistic killer stalks them from the shadows. Following the tradition of previous entries, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo is not a dire...

When I first saw the teaser trailer for Exit 8, I was cautiously optimistic; original high-concept films like this scratch a special Cube-shaped itch that I'm a sucker for. But when my teenage son saw it, he immediately recognized it. He pointed out that it was based on The Exit 8, a four-dollar indie tech demo on Steam that went viral on Twitch a while back. He explained the whole concept to me: you walk down the same sterile, yellow-tiled Japanese subway corridor over and over again. If you notice a weird anomaly like a poster expanding, a light flickering, or a creepy guy sprinting at you, you turn around. If everything looks normal, you keep walking until you hit Exit 8. That is the whole thing. It takes about forty minutes to finish, and half the fun for his age group is just watching streamers jump out of their chairs when a door disappears. On paper, taking a four-dollar memory game with zero plot and stretching it into a feature-length film could easily look like a cheap gi...

The Weight is a Great Depression-era thriller featuring Ethan Hawke as a father forced into a brutal gold-smuggling operation by a work camp warden, played by Russell Crowe. Directed by Padraic McKinley, the film explores themes of desperation and survival, focusing on the harrowing journey through the 1933 Oregon wilderness. Watch the trailer below to see the film's gritty atmosphere.

When you look back at Jean-Claude Van Damme's golden run in the late eighties and early nineties, Lionheart occupies a very specific, weirdly emotional space. Coming right off the back of Bloodsport and Kickboxer , this was the movie where someone at Universal apparently said, "What if we take the guy who does the fancy spin kicks, but we make him cry every twenty minutes?" The result is a bizarre mix of brutal bare-knuckle violence and soap opera melodrama that shouldn't work at all, yet somehow remains one of the most enjoyable things JCVD ever put on film. The premise is pure 1990 straight-to-video gold, even though it got a full theatrical release. Van Damme plays Lyon Gaultier, a French Foreign Legionnaire stationed in a remote outpost in Djibouti. Right at the start, he gets a letter from his sister-in-law back in Los Angeles. His brother, a street-level drug dealer, was set on fire in a bad deal and is lying in a hospital bed calling out for Lyon. Lyon asks h...

On today's episode, I'm chatting with cinematographer James Kniest about his work on the upcoming Amazon original film, The Devil's Mouth. The setup is classic survival horror: a group of college friends on a Thailand trip end up trapped in submerged caves. Oxygen is running low, there's a dangerous predator in the water with them, and all their ugly personal baggage and past conflicts start bubbling up while they try not to die. What makes or breaks a movie like this usually comes down to how real that claustrophobia feels, so James and I talk about what it actually takes to shoot in dark, wet, cramped spaces without it looking like a soundstage. Before we get to that interview, I want to talk about a fantastic new track from the San Francisco punk band Tess & The Details. They just released a cover of Green Day's "Scattered," which is featured on a new Green Day tribute compilation out from Coffin Curse Records and Punk Rock Radar. Even better, all t...

Blake Edwards was always at his absolute best when he was backing himself into a corner where the only way out was pure, unadulterated absurdity. By 1984, the man had already given us the slapstick mayhem of the Pink Panther movies and the Hollywood satire of S.O.B. , but Micki & Maude might be one of his most deeply chaotic setups. It's a comedy about a guy who gets two women pregnant at the exact same time, panics, marries them both, and then spends the next hour and a half trying to keep them from finding out while managing two wildly different domestic lives. If you pitched that script today, it would probably get tossed out the window before you even finished the logline, or at the very least, it would be turned into a dark, gritty psychological thriller about a pathologically dishonest liar. But back in the mid-80s, with Dudley Moore in the lead role, it somehow becomes a breezy, hysterical, and surprisingly charming farce. It shouldn't work. The protagonist is, on ...

If you only know Judd Nelson as the rebellious, soft-hearted criminal from The Breakfast Club , watching him in William Lustig's Relentless is going to give you some serious whiplash. He is still playing a guy with a bad attitude and a leather jacket, but this time around, there is no redemptive dance sequence at the end. Instead, he spends ninety minutes sweating, staring with massive dark circles under his eyes, and strangling random people he finds in the white pages. Relentless came out in 1989, right at the tail end of a decade that was absolutely obsessed with gritty, sun-bleached Los Angeles crime thrillers. It sits in that comfortable, slightly greasy space between a theatrical police procedural and a straight-to-video slasher. It is not trying to reinvent the wheel, but it has a raw, mean energy that makes it incredibly easy to watch, even when the plot logic starts to stretch thin. The movie follows two LAPD detectives who are trying to track down a killer the media has...

  Hey everyone, welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. Before we get into today’s show, do me a quick favor: if you’re enjoying what we're doing here, take two seconds to leave us a review, hit that subscribe button, and send this episode to a friend who loves movies. It really helps us out and keeps the lights on. This week’s episode is brought to you by the folks at Universal Pictures Home Video to celebrate their release of Obsession. They’ve been kind enough to give us a copy to pass along to one of you. If you want to get your hands on it, we're running a quick giveaway. Just send an email over to editor@followingfilms.com with the subject line "I want Obsession" and tell us why you should win. Just make sure you include your full name and your mailing address in the body of the email so we know where to send it if your name gets drawn. Today, we're talking with Double Danger, the French musical duo who handled the score for Evil Dead Burn. The movie ju...