FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Taking on a sequel to Stuart Gordon’s 1985 classic was always going to be an awful, thankless job. The original Re-Animator was a complete accident of late-80s genre filmmaking: mean, insanely fast, hilarious, and dripping with enough fake blood to rust an engine block. When producer Brian Yuzna decided to direct the 1990 follow-up himself, he didn't even bother trying to copy Gordon’s tight pacing or pitch-black comedic beats. He just dragged the whole thing sideways into raw, trashy, midnight-movie territory. The result is a total mess of a narrative, but it happens to be a ridiculously fun mess. The story picks up eight months after the Miskatonic University disaster. Somehow, Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) haven't lost their medical licenses. Instead, they're hiding out as volunteer doctors dodging mortar shells in a Peruvian civil war zone. It's an absurd opening, but it gets West right back to his favorite pastime. He isn't satisfi...

When Steven Spielberg returns to sci-fi, people usually expect wide-eyed kid protagonists, glowing bikes, or massive CGI warships obliterating city blocks. Disclosure Day isn't really that. It's much moodier, far more paranoid, and grounded in the bureaucratic messiness of how the actual government would react if aliens finally verified they exist. The movie skips the grand white house lawn announcements and spends its time in dimly lit briefing rooms, secure server facilities, and muddy Midwest backroads. It's a film about secrets, institutional panic, and human stubbornness. Now that Universal has dropped the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, we can take a proper look at how this slow-burn thriller holds up at home, both as a piece of filmmaking and as a technical presentation. The plot follows Dr. Maya Vance, played with a brilliant, exhausted intensity by Emily Blunt. Vance is a mid-level analyst working for a defense contractor who stumbles across an encrypted vault of telemetry da...

Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates came out back in 2001, right in that post- Saving Private Ryan sweet spot where Hollywood suddenly remembered WWII movies could be gritty, bloody, and massively profitable. But instead of the Normandy beaches, Annaud dragged us straight into the freezing, corpse-ridden rubble of Stalingrad in 1942. If you haven't seen it in a while, or if you only know it from cable TV re-runs, the story centers on Vassili Zaitsev, played by Jude Law with a questionable Russian accent that somehow still works. Vassili is a humble farm boy from the Urals who happens to be a crack shot with a rifle. After surviving the horrific opening charge across the Volga River, he gets picked up by Danilov, a Soviet political officer played by Joseph Fiennes. Danilov realizes the Red Army desperately needs a hero to boost morale, so he turns Vassili into a living propaganda legend through state newspapers. Before long, Vassili is picking off German officers left and...

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...

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 ...

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...

Now that it's hitting 4K Blu-ray and DVD, let's talk about the actual box office miracle of 2026, Curry Barker’s Obsession. It is absolutely wild that a movie made for under a million bucks, by a guy who used to make YouTube sketches, is currently sitting on over four hundred million dollars worldwide. If you spend any time on Letterboxd or film Twitter, you literally cannot escape people screaming about this thing. It is the kind of word-of-mouth phenomenon that studios try to manufacture with fifty-million-dollar marketing budgets and completely fail, yet here comes a guy who shot Milk & Serial on a shoestring, dropping one of the most unsettling, deeply uncomfortable supernatural thrillers in years. If you haven't caught it yet, the premise sounds like a basic, almost corny morality tale, but the execution is where it completely warps your brain. We follow Bear, played by Michael Johnston, who is your classic, slightly pathetic, deeply lonely music store employee. He...

The 1971 international co-production Red Sun (released in Europe as Soleil rouge ) remains one of the most fascinating anomalies in global cinema. Directed by Terence Young, the British filmmaker who essentially built the cinematic blueprint for James Bond in Dr. No and From Russia with Love , the movie is an ambitious, genre-blurring hybrid. It marries the cynical, sun-baked landscape of the Spaghetti Western with the rigid, honor-bound traditions of the Japanese chambara, or samurai film. Shot in the rugged deserts of Almería, Spain, the production brought together an almost unbelievable international quartet of stars: American tough guy Charles Bronson, Japanese screen icon Toshirō Mifune, French hearthrob Alain Delon, and Swiss starlet Ursula Andress. On paper, this cross-cultural melting pot sounds like a blatant studio gimmick cooked up to appease multiple global box offices at once. In execution, however, it delivers a remarkably cohesive, tonally unique action-adventure that ...