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There is a specific strain of late nineties studio filmmaking that just doesn't exist anymore. It's that strange mid-budget threshold where executives would toss $60 million at a director, rent out post-Soviet Moscow for a few weeks, and let a peak-era movie star run around wearing ridiculous wigs while pretending to be a master thief. Paramount's 1997 take on The Saint is absolute prime vintage for this era. It isn't a great movie by traditional standards, but it's wildly entertaining, intensely nostalgic, and completely committed to its own ridiculous premise. Now, Paramount has finally brought it to 4K Ultra HD in a limited edition SteelBook, giving Val Kilmer’s parade of absurd accents a surprisingly pristine physical media home. If you grew up watching this on cable, you already know the vibe. Kilmer plays Simon Templar, a high-tech international thief for hire who names all his disguises after Catholic saints. He doesn't have a past, he doesn't have a ...

Popeye (1980) has always been one of the strange, beautiful disasters of American cinema. When Paramount and Disney dumped millions of dollars into a live-action musical adaptation of E.C. Segar’s comic strip, they probably expected a breezy, family-friendly blockbuster to rival Superman. What they got instead was a Robert Altman film. It was chaotic, murky, deeply weird, and endlessly eccentric. For years, it carried the reputation of a historic box-office bomb, even though it actually made decent money. Now, marking its 45th anniversary, Paramount has given this misunderstood oddity a full 4K UHD Blu-ray release. The result is a disc that makes a compelling case for why Altman’s bizarre passion project deserves a second look. The Film: Chaos in Sweethaven If you go into Popeye expecting the clean, punchy pacing of the classic Fleischer cartoons, you are going to be deeply confused. Altman was never interested in standard Hollywood narrative mechanics. Instead of a tight three-act sto...

Back in 1990, Jean-Claude Van Damme was on a run that felt pretty much unstoppable. Fresh off Bloodsport and Kickboxer, Cannon Films and MGM were trying to figure out every possible scenario to throw this high-kicking Belgian into. The solution for Death Warrant? Put him in a maximum-security prison, give him an undercover cop badge, and see how many inmates he can spin-kick before the standard 89-minute runtime ticks away. It is raw, sweaty, heavily standardized B-movie action, and MVD Rewind Collection has given it an absurdly lavish 4K UHD release that it honestly probably didn't know it deserved. If you haven't seen it in a while, the setup is delightfully absurd. Van Damme plays Louis Burke, a Canadian Mountie turned LAPD detective who gets assigned to go undercover as a convict at Harrison State Penitentiary. Why? Because prisoners are dying under mysterious circumstances, and the governor needs someone on the inside to investigate. Naturally, instead of taking notes or d...

Going into Project Hail Mary, my biggest fear was that we were just going to get The Martian 2.0 with a higher budget and weirder aliens. Andy Weir has a very specific flavor of sci-fi writing, where every single problem is solved by high school chemistry and a guy muttering calculations to himself while eating bad space food. When you translate that to a movie studio spending two hundred million dollars, there is a massive temptation to sanitize the whole thing into a sleek, shiny IMAX product. Thankfully, Phil Lord and Chris Miller are simply too weird to let that happen. They took what could have been a standard, sterile survival flick and turned it into something surprisingly greasy, chaotic, and genuinely funny. The premise is still as absurdly high-stakes as the book. Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship with zero memory of who he is, two dead crewmates rotting in their pods next to him, and a slow-burning realization that he is the last ditch effort to stop a microscopic space o...

If you spent any part of the early 2000s in a basement hanging out with horror movie nerds, you probably remember when House of 1000 Corpses finally hit theaters after sitting on a shelf forever. Rob Zombie took a sledgehammer to mainstream studio horror, dragging audiences through greasy gas stations, fried chicken joints, and subterranean murder pits with the unhinged Firefly family. Now, Lionsgate is bundling the whole blood-soaked saga into an 8-disc Firefly Trilogy set arriving October 13, 2026, right in time for Halloween. This set packs in House of 1000 Corpses (2002), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and 3 From Hell (2019) across 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and Digital. The biggest selling point for physical media hoarders is that House of 1000 Corpses is finally getting a 4K transfer in Dolby Vision. All that neon lighting, basement grime, and sticky fake blood should look appropriately filthy in high resolution. Looking back, the three movies map out Zombie's evolution as a director...

Can you believe it’s been 25 years since Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn followed up Swingers with Made? Lionsgate Limited is marking the silver anniversary by releasing the buddy mob comedy on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and Digital on September 15th, available exclusively through the Lionsgate Limited storefront . If you haven't seen it in a while, Made holds up as a wonderfully painful cringe comedy. Favreau, who also wrote and directed, plays Bobby, a deeply average guy just trying to get through a low-level mob assignment in New York without dying of embarrassment. His main obstacle isn't the actual gangsters, though. It's his childhood friend Ricky, played with relentless, obnoxious energy by Vince Vaughn. Ricky is the ultimate loose cannon, constantly dropping hilarious nonsense slang, picking fights with bouncers, and treating a low-stakes errand like he's starring in Goodfellas. The movie works so well because it leans hard into the messy, irritating dynamic of a long-t...

I was sent a 4K copy of Baz Luhrmann's EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert a few days ago. This weekend I popped the disc in, and honestly, I've been wrestling with what to make of it ever since. On paper, it sounds like an easy money grab. Luhrmann takes the leftover archival material, 16mm scraps, and 8mm home videos he dug up while making his 2022 scripted biopic, hands them over to Peter Jackson's restoration wizards at Park Road Post, and packages a 97-minute concert film for home video. You hear "AI audio isolation and restored 1970s footage," and your brain immediately expects a shiny, airbrushed, corporate legacy project meant to sell box sets to baby boomers. It isn't that at all. It's weirder, sweatier, and much more uncomfortably human than I expected, especially sitting on your couch with the lights off while native 4K highlights every single flaw in the original stock. If you've seen Luhrmann's earlier work, you know he's usually incapa...

When word first got around that someone was making a movie called Hungry about a killer hippo terrorizing tourists in the Louisiana bayou, almost everyone assumed we were getting a trashy, tongue-in-cheek B-movie. The internet immediately started making jokes about Hasbro copyright lawsuits and Hungry Hungry Hippos , expecting a schlocky, self-aware creature feature along the lines of Cocaine Bear or Sharknado . Instead, director James Nunn made something surprisingly gloomy, strangely deadpan, and almost completely devoid of wink-at-the-camera humor. Hungry is an 88-minute survival thriller that takes its bizarre premise with absolute, straight-faced seriousness. It does not always work, and it definitely suffers from pacing issues that will test the patience of anyone expecting a non-stop monster rampage, but there is something fascinating about a movie that refuses to give the audience the easy, campy ride they asked for. The setup is basic enough to write on the back of a coaste...

  Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. I'm your host, and today we are talking about a show that probably sounds like a strange candidate for a modern streaming reboot, until you actually look at how they made it. When Netflix announced a new take on "Little House on the Prairie," a lot of people reasonably expected a soft, nostalgic retread of the 1970s TV series. Instead, the 2026 reboot starring Alice Halsey, Luke Bracey, and Warren Christie dropped last month, and it is a completely different beast. It pulls much closer to the raw, gritty reality of the original books than the old show ever did. It already got picked up for a second season, and a huge reason the series hits the way it does comes down to how it looks. My guest today is cinematographer C. Kim Miles, ASC, CSC, MYSC. He shot four of the eight episodes this season, and he had to deal with absolute chaos to pull it off. We're talking severe prairie weather, tornadoes, ticks, rough terrain, and k...