FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Keeper from 2025 continues Osgood Perkins’s exploration of slow-building psychological horror, reaffirming his reputation as a filmmaker more interested in dread than spectacle. Like his previous work, the film resists conventional horror rhythms and instead focuses on atmosphere, emotional unease, and the quiet terror of isolation. Keeper is not designed to shock in obvious ways. It unsettles through patience, ambiguity, and a steady erosion of safety that lingers long after the film ends. The narrative centers on a remote setting and a small group of characters whose sense of control gradually dissolves. Perkins has always favored confined spaces and limited perspectives, and Keeper follows that tradition closely. The film unfolds at a deliberate pace, allowing the audience to sit with discomfort rather than escape it. Events are presented without urgency, which paradoxically increases tension. The absence of constant explanation forces the viewer to observe closely and draw their ow...

Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) occupies a fascinating and sometimes underappreciated place in the slasher canon. Arriving just one year after Sean S. Cunningham’s surprise hit Friday the 13th, the sequel had the unenviable task of continuing a story that seemed, on the surface, neatly wrapped up. Instead of merely repeating the original’s formula, Part 2 subtly reorients the franchise, laying down many of the elements that would come to define Friday the 13th as a long-running series rather than a one-off success. While it may lack the novelty and shock value of its predecessor, it compensates with atmosphere, character, and, most importantly, the first fully realized incarnation of Jason Voorhees as the franchise’s central menace. One of the most striking aspects of Friday the 13th Part 2 is how it reframes the mythology of Crystal Lake. The opening recap reframes the ending of the first film, reasserting Jason’s drowning as the primal trauma of the series while quickly moving past Pam...

Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) is a deceptively simple science-fiction thriller that has grown more significant with time. On its surface, the film is a high-concept adventure about a futuristic theme park where wealthy guests can live out fantasies without consequences. Beneath that surface, however, lies an unnervingly clear-eyed warning about technological arrogance, corporate hubris, and humanity’s blind faith in systems it barely understands. Though modest in scale and restrained in style, Westworld remains influential precisely because of its clarity and restraint. The premise is immediately compelling. Delos, a high-end amusement resort, offers three immersive worlds, Westworld, Medieval World, and Roman World, populated by lifelike androids programmed to serve human desires. Guests can drink, fight, seduce, and kill without fear of retaliation. The androids, known simply as robots, are designed to malfunction safely: if something goes wrong, they shut down. Or so the desig...

Roofman is one of those rare films that takes an unbelievable true story and transforms it into something quietly meaningful. Directed by Derek Cianfrance, the 2025 film resists easy categorization. It is not a traditional crime thriller, nor is it a straightforward comedy or romance. Instead, it is a thoughtful and surprisingly warm character study that finds humanity in an unlikely place. By focusing less on spectacle and more on emotional truth, Roofman becomes a film that lingers long after it ends. The story follows Jeffrey Manchester, portrayed by Channing Tatum, a former Army reservist who earns the nickname “Roofman” by robbing fast food restaurants through their roofs. After being imprisoned, Manchester escapes and secretly lives inside a closed Toys “R” Us, constructing a strange but functional life while remaining hidden from the world. On paper, this premise sounds absurd. In execution, it becomes poignant. The film treats Manchester’s situation not as a gimmick, but as a r...

T eenage Mutant Ninja Turtles  (1990) occupies a fascinating spot in pop-culture history. It arrived at a moment when the ninja turtle craze was at full commercial saturation, cartoons, toys, arcade games, and yet it chose, somewhat boldly, not to simply replicate the candy-colored tone of the Saturday morning series. Instead, director Steve Barron and the filmmaking team looked back toward Eastman and Laird’s original Mirage comics, blending grit and humor into a film that was darker, moodier, and more grounded than most viewers, especially parents, expected. That unexpected tonal mix is precisely why the film still holds up more than three decades later. Visually, the movie is immediately defined by its practical effects. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop created the turtle suits, and they remain one of the film’s greatest strengths. These suits could so easily have slipped into camp or awkward immobility, but instead they manage a delicate magic trick: the turtles look tactile, weight...

“Snakes on a Plane” has always lived at the intersection of joke and movie, meme and text. Released in 2006 and instantly absorbed into internet culture, it’s a film whose title seemed to do all the work in advance: there are snakes, and they are on a plane. The promise is both absurdly high-concept and blatantly literal. Yet within that simplicity lies the reason the film remains oddly enduring: it is fully aware of its own ridiculousness and leans into it with gusto. The premise is straightforward pulp. An FBI agent, played with relaxed authority and winking intensity by Samuel L. Jackson, escorts a key witness on a commercial airliner. A crime lord, unwilling to let justice unfold through ordinary legal channels, arranges to sabotage the flight by releasing a cargo hold full of venomous snakes midair. Chaos ensues, bodies pile up, oxygen masks drop, and the laws of herpetology bend to the needs of cinema. What follows is part disaster movie, part creature feature, and part meta-come...

Under Siege occupies an interesting and now rather nostalgic place in the action-movie landscape. Released in 1992 and directed by Andrew Davis, the film is both a quintessential product of its era and a surprisingly polished entry in the “Die Hard-on-a-[insert location here]” subgenre. It stars Steven Seagal at the height of his box-office popularity as Casey Ryback, a Navy cook who is, of course, not merely a cook, but a former elite operative demoted for insubordination. When terrorists take control of the battleship USS Missouri, Ryback becomes the only person aboard capable of stopping them. The result is a tight, contained thriller that pairs efficient action mechanics with memorable villains and an earnest, slightly self-serious tone that oddly works in its favor. At its core, Under Siege succeeds because of its simplicity. The premise is clear, stakes are straightforward, and the geography of the story, a massive battleship, creates a sense of claustrophobic escalation. Unlike ...

Catch Me If You Can is one of those rare films that manages to be breezy and exuberant while quietly sneaking up on you with emotional weight. Directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 2002, it tells the story of Frank Abagnale Jr., a teenage con artist who successfully impersonates a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer while cashing millions of dollars in fraudulent checks. On the surface, that premise sounds like the setup for a slick caper. But the true pleasure of the film lies not just in its clever scams and period style; it’s in how Spielberg turns a crime story into something more tender—an exploration of identity, loneliness, and the longing to belong. Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Frank Abagnale Jr. is the film’s emotional engine. He plays Frank not as a mastermind from the outset, but as a frightened, reactive kid with razor-sharp instincts. This nuance matters. The film doesn’t lionize fraud; instead, it roots Frank’s actions in disruption—his parents’ divorce, fin...

Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) is a sleek, propulsive science-fiction thriller that stands out not only for its imaginative vision of the future but also for the philosophical questions it raises about free will, justice, and the ethics of surveillance. Adapted loosely from a short story by Philip K. Dick, the film combines Spielberg’s instinct for spectacle with a darker, more paranoid tone, resulting in one of the most intellectually engaging mainstream sci-fi films of the early 2000s. Set in Washington, D.C. in the year 2054, Minority Report imagines a society in which murder has been virtually eliminated thanks to the “PreCrime” division of law enforcement. PreCrime relies on three psychic “precogs” who can foresee murders before they happen. When the system predicts a killing, police intervene and arrest the future murderer moments before the act occurs. The premise is both elegant and unsettling: if a crime is prevented, can it still be considered a crime? And if the f...

Sequels often arrive with an unspoken promise: more of what worked last time, just louder. The Black Phone 2 takes a different, riskier path. Rather than attempting to recreate the suffocating simplicity of the original film, director Scott Derrickson expands the world, the themes, and the emotional burden placed on its characters. The result is a sequel that is darker, messier, and more ambitious, a film less interested in pure terror than in what happens after terror has already done its damage. The first Black Phone was defined by confinement. Its power came from a single basement, a single monster, and a child forced to grow up far too quickly. The sequel opens that space dramatically, both physically and psychologically. Finney and Gwen Shaw are no longer trapped children; they are survivors carrying the invisible weight of what they endured. This shift alone signals that The Black Phone 2 is not trying to be a repeat experience. It wants to examine the long shadow of trauma rathe...

Justin Tipping’s HIM is a genre hybrid that merges sports drama, psychological thriller, and stylized horror into one disorienting, fever-dream narrative about ambition, identity, and the cost of greatness. Produced by Monkeypaw, the film embraces an operatic sense of dread, pairing football mythology with ritualistic imagery to create something that feels both familiar and deeply uncanny. Whether every choice lands will vary by viewer, but its aesthetic boldness and thematic ambition make it an undeniably distinctive entry in contemporary horror storytelling. At the heart of the film is Cameron Cade, a young quarterback whose trajectory appears predetermined; he’s the type of athlete scouts whisper about, the kind fans attach their dreams to. That dream collapses when Cameron is violently attacked by a stranger, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury just before the scouting combine. The attack is staged with unsettling intimacy: lingering camera movement, muffled sound, and sudden...