FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Ultraman: Towards the Future (1990) When we talk about the sprawling legacy of Tsuburaya Productions, the early 1990s often feel like a forgotten frontier. After Ultraman 80 ended its run in 1981, the franchise went into a sort of live-action hibernation on television. The silence was finally broken not in Tokyo, but in the rugged landscapes of South Australia. Ultraman: Towards the Future (known in Japan as Ultraman Great ) stands as a fascinating anomaly: a high-concept, environmentally conscious co-production that attempted to westernize the Giant of Light without stripping away his soul. The series opens with an ambitious scope. Astronauts Jack Shindo and Stanley Haggard are exploring the surface of Mars when they witness a titanic struggle between a silver giant and a grotesque, pulsating entity known as Gudis. This isn't just a monster-of-the-week; Gudis is a sentient virus, a cosmic cancer that seeks to assimilate all life. When Stanley is killed and Jack is left strand...

The release of Adventure Calls! Karl May at CCC marks a significant milestone for North American fans of European cult cinema. For decades, the massive popularity of Karl May in Germany was something of a mystery to American audiences, but this collection from the Masters of Cinema series finally provides a definitive look at the lavish, globe-trotting spectacles produced by Artur Brauner. These films represent a bridge between the classic Hollywood adventures of the fifties and the more gritty, violent landscapes of the Spaghetti Western, offering a brand of escapism that is as visually stunning as it is historically fascinating. Karl May was a man who famously wrote about worlds he had never visited, yet his ability to capture the spirit of adventure made him a literary titan. Brauner’s CCC Film took that literary spirit and translated it into a cinematic language that dominated European box offices throughout the sixties. Old Shatterhand and Winnetou and Shatterhand in the Valley of...

When it comes to the golden age of the drive-in, few experiences could match the sheer, unadulterated joy of the double feature. It was a time when narrative logic took a backseat to high-concept monsters and the kind of atmospheric grime that only a low-budget production could provide. VCI Entertainment has tapped directly into that nostalgia with their Creepy Double Feature line, and their latest Blu-ray pairing brings together two titans of 1963 psychotronic cinema: The Crawling Hand and The Slime People. This disc is a celebration of a very specific era in independent filmmaking—a moment where the atomic dread of the fifties began to melt into the weird, pop-infused sensibilities of the early sixties. On one hand, you have the localized, noir-tinged horror of a space-borne limb terrorizing a California boarding house; on the other, a sprawling, fog-drenched vision of a subterranean invasion that turns Los Angeles into a claustrophobic wasteland. While these films were birthed from ...

Johannes Roberts has never really gone for subtlety, and with Primate (2026), he is insn't dealing with any greys. This is a movie that’s all bite, lean, mean, and not here to hold your hand. If 47 Meters Down was about the terror beneath the ocean, Primate brings the monster right into your living room, twisting home into a place you can’t trust. Since it hit theaters earlier this year, it’s already sparked plenty of arguments. People either love its throwback, practical-effects bravado or walk out queasy. Either way, it’s a bloody good time, if that’s your kind of thing. The story is a straightforward slasher meets creature-feature. Lucy, played by Johnny Sequoyah, heads back to her family’s fancy Hawaiian clifftop estate, hauling along a mixed bag of college friends. Some supportive, some flirtatious, some just there to die dramatically, classic setup. But the real focus isn’t just on her stoic dad, Adam (Troy Kotsur, who brings real soul), or her little sister Erin. It’s Ben, t...

If you were a teenager in the mid-90s with a penchant for classic rock and a somewhat questionable haircut, chances are you found a VHS copy of The Stoned Age (1994) shoved in a corner of your local Blockbuster, right between Spinal Tap and some direct-to-video horror flick. For years, I was one of those people who looked at the cover, two guys in a beat-up blue van, and immediately rolled my eyes. I dismissed it as a desperate, low-rent Dazed and Confused knock-off. On the surface, the DNA is undeniably shared: it’s a period-piece "hangout" movie set in the 1970s, fueled by a soundtrack of heavy riffs, centered on the eternal quest for beer and girls, and steeped in the hazy atmosphere of suburban aimlessness. But after finally sitting down with Joe and Hubbs for ninety minutes of "schnappiness," I realized I was wrong. While Linklater’s masterpiece is a sweeping, multi-character tapestry of nostalgia and philosophy, The Stoned Age is something far more concentrate...

When Parks and Recreation first hit the air, Chris Pratt’s Andy Dwyer was the soul of the show. He was the lovable, dim-witted goofball who lived in a pit and played in a band called Mouse Rat. There was an inherent, puppy-dog vulnerability to Pratt back then, a human-ness that felt unmanufactured. We rooted for him because he felt like the guy next door who just happened to be hilarious. Fast forward to 2026, and the Pratt-ification of Hollywood has moved into a sophisticated and effective new phase with Mercy. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, this is a screenlife techno-thriller that feels less like a movie and more like a high-stress Zoom call from hell, and it is here that Pratt finds a way to weaponize that old Pawnee charm into something far more visceral. The film is set in a grim, near-future Los Angeles. Pratt plays Detective Christopher Raven, a man who has spent his career championing the Mercy program, an AI-driven judicial system designed to eliminate human bias and legal re...

Oliver Hermanus has a particular knack for capturing the kind of longing that feels like it’s vibrating just under the skin. With The History of Sound, he’s taken Ben Shattuck’s prose and turned it into a film that feels less like a traditional period romance and more like a fragile, scratched recording of a memory. It premiered at Cannes before making its way to us via Mubi, and while it carries the aesthetic weight of a high-end historical drama, it’s the intimate, almost whispered connection between Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor that keeps it from ever feeling like a museum piece. The story starts in 1917, in the shadow of a world about to break apart. Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) are students at the New England Conservatory of Music, two young men who find each other in a pub and instantly bond over a shared obsession with folk music. Their connection is immediate and physical, a brief window of warmth before the United States enters World War I. The conservatory shuts ...

I’ve never made it to the Laurentian Mountains, but every time I see them on screen, they just seem so peaceful. Huge, quiet, beautiful. But Dream Eater doesn’t care about any of that calm. In this one, the mountains stand there frozen, almost judging, as a single cabin’s world crumbles inside. This isn’t your typical found footage scare fest, either. Dream Eater, directed by Jay Drakulic, Mallory Drumm, and Alex Lee Williams, proves there’s still plenty of life and dread left in a genre people love to dismiss as played out. Forget cheap jump scares or flashy effects. The filmmakers dig deep, focusing on the small, uncomfortable unraveling of the people at its center, until the whole thing feels a bit too real. I'm genuinely shocked by what Blind Luck Pictures pulled off on a $100,000 budget. They turned next to nothing into something huge. In the film, Mallory is a documentary filmmaker. Her boyfriend Alex is starting to lose himself to a violent sleep disorder, and it’s getting w...

Alex Russell’s Lurker is the kind of movie that makes you want to set your phone on fire and move to a cabin in the woods, yet you can’t look away from it for a single second. Premiering at Sundance before hitting theaters via Mubi in late 2025, it’s a psychological thriller that feels less like a fictional story and more like a biological study of the modern fame machine. It’s a film about the jagged, blurry line where fandom ends and stalking begins, and how easily the people we admire can become the people we own. At the center of this spiral is Matthew Morning, played by Théodore Pellerin with a jittery, desperate energy that is deeply uncomfortable to watch. Matthew is a retail worker in Los Angeles, the kind of guy who feels like he’s constantly auditioning for a life he hasn't been invited to yet. His break comes when a rising pop star named Oliver, played by Archie Madekwe, walks into his store. Matthew doesn't just ring him up; he performs for him, playing a deep cut f...

Zak Hilditch has a gift for making the end of the world feel uncomfortably small and intimate. In We Bury the Dead, he moves away from the global panic of These Final Hours and the period piece dread of 1922 to give us something that feels like a heavy, dirt-stained funeral shroud. Set in the immediate, muddy aftermath of a U.S. military experiment gone wrong off the coast of Tasmania, the movie isn't interested in the why of the catastrophe as much as the how of the mourning. It is a film about the physical, back-breaking labor of grief, and it is easily the most grounded work Daisy Ridley has ever put on screen. The setup is bleak and procedural. An experimental weapon detonates, wiping out Hobart and leaving the rest of the island’s population brain-dead. But as the military and civilian volunteers quickly realize, these bodies don't stay still. They regain motor function, becoming a quiet, stumbling breed of the undead that are more tragic than they are terrifying. Ridley p...