FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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...

There is a very specific kind of low-budget horror movie that arrives with modest expectations, spends a little under two hours suffocating you with dread, and leaves you staring at the end credits trying to figure out if you actually loved it or if you were just paralyzed by how creepy it was. Damian McCarthy’s Hokum is exactly that kind of movie. It does not try to hold your hand, it does not bother with a warm opening act, and it definitely does not care if you leave the theater feeling comfortable. The setup follows Ohm Bauman, an embittered, alcoholic horror novelist played by Adam Scott. Ohm is stuck on the ending of his latest book and generally holds a pretty low opinion of everyone around him. He decides Halloween weekend is the ideal time to trek out to the Bilberry Woods Hotel, a damp, fading inn in West Cork, Ireland. His official reason for being there is to scatter his late parents' ashes near a redwood tree from an old photograph of his mother. But almost as soon as ...

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...