FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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 ...

Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993) is as much a Rorschach test as it is a smog-choked thriller. Released at a point of intense cultural volatility in American history, specifically on the heels of the 1992 Los Angeles riots that exploded after the acquittal of 4 LAPD officers who beat Rodney King on videotape, and during an economic recession that left white-collar workers feeling increasingly precarious, the film captured a precise, ugly, and resonant cultural nerve. Viewed today, it feels less like a relic of the nineties and more like an uncanny, predictive text for the modern landscape of alienation, political polarization, and online radicalization. It is a film about the fracturing of the American Dream, told through the perspective of a man who believed the marketing copy, only to find himself bankrupt in a world that no longer recognizes him. The narrative architecture of the film is deceptively simple, adopting a classic Odyssean structure transposed onto the gridlocked asp...

Kristoffer Borgli has carved out a genuinely weird, unsettling niche in modern cinema. He loves poking at the fragile ways we build our egos and social identities, and with The Drama, he moves away from the viral internet infamy of his previous work to tear apart something much older: the deeply performative ritual of a modern wedding. On paper, it sounds like a standard psychological thriller or a pitch-black comedy about domestic secrets. In reality, the movie functions as a relentless, high-stress endurance test of what unconditional love actually means. Borgli doesn't just tell a story; he weaponizes the audience's expectations, flipping a standard romantic setup on its head to create something deeply deeply uncomfortable. It moves with the slow, agonizing inevitability of a car crash you can't look away from. To get the full, gut-punch effect of what he’s doing here, you absolutely have to walk into the theater knowing as close to zero as possible. The marketing did a ...