FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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...

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...

Revenge movies usually try to sell you some big, clean moral lesson about how violence only breeds more violence, or how seeking vengeance is like digging two graves. They want you to feel bad for wanting the bad guy to get his skull caved in. Aleshea Harris’ film adaptation of her own play, Is God Is, does not care about any of that moral hand-wringing. It is a mean, funny, blood-splattered Southern Gothic western that looks at trauma and says, yeah, some people just need to die, and the people killing them are probably going to ruin their own lives doing it, but we are going to watch every messy second of it anyway. If you are coming into this expecting a glossy, prestige thriller, you are going to get hit in the face with something much weirder. The movie is based on Harris’ award-winning play, and she directs it herself for her feature debut. Usually, when playwrights direct their own movie adaptations, the result is stiff and claustrophobic. You get a bunch of actors standing in a...

Gus Van Sant has always been at his best when he’s looking at people who are completely falling apart at the seams. Think about the drifters in My Own Private Idaho , the isolated teenagers in Paranoid Park , or the kids wandering the hallways in Elephant . He doesn’t really do glossy, manufactured Hollywood drama. He likes the weird, messy, uncomfortable corners of real life where there are no clean resolutions. With Dead Man’s Wire , he’s found a real-life historical subject that fits his entire cinematic worldview like a glove. It is a story that is almost too bizarre and intense to be true, but it actually happened back in the dead of winter in 1977 in Indianapolis. The film covers the stranger-than-fiction story of Tony Kiritsis, an ordinary, middle-aged guy who got so utterly pushed to the edge by his mortgage company that he snapped. In a state of pure, manic desperation, he wired a live, sawed-off shotgun directly to a banker’s neck with a complex system of wire and a dead man...

Long before Neil Armstrong uttered his historic words on the dusty plains of the Sea of Tranquility, and nearly two decades before Stanley Kubrick redefined the cosmos with his masterpiece, a small independent film did something truly revolutionary. It treated space travel not as a setting for ray-gun gothic fantasies or alien monster invasions, but as a hard, sober engineering challenge. Released in 1950, Destination Moon, which was directed by Irving Pichel and produced by the legendary George Pal, was the first major American film to trade in the pulp of the era for the cold, precise calculations of real-world physics. While modern audiences might look back at its slow pacing, wooden dialogue, and bold Technicolor palette with a sense of quaint nostalgia, viewing the film today requires a different lens. It is a cinematic time capsule, a blueprint of human ambition drafted at the dawn of the Cold War, functioning as both an impressive technical milestone and a fascinating ideologica...

It took sixteen years for director Francesco Lucente to finally get Starbright out of development hell and onto the screen in early 2026. The result? A massive, 148-minute fantasy experiment that is already dividing anyone brave enough to sit through it. Written by Joseph Bitonti and Olimpia Lucente, the film tries to be a little bit of everything: a cosmic fairytale, a small-town family drama, a sweeping romance, and, bizarrely, a gritty crime thriller. If you are looking for a gentle, nostalgic escape that pushes a pure message of hope, you might actually find some comfort here. But for the rest of us, Starbright quickly turns into an exhausting, incoherent mess. It constantly trips over its own feet, crushed by mismatched tones, way too many subplots, and pacing that makes two and a half hours feel like four. The core story starts out simply enough. We meet Aisling (Alexandra Dowling), an orphaned young Irish woman stuck on a lonely, weathered farm at the edge of a dying American to...

The cinematic landscape of Tromaville, New Jersey, has always functioned as a toxic, sludge-covered mirror to our own society. Ever since the legendary Toxic Avenger picked up his first mop back in 1984, Troma Entertainment has proudly flown the flag of uncompromising, low-budget, independent filmmaking. Over the decades, we have seen atomic disasters, mutant high schools, and avian zombies terrorize this fictional town, yet it remains an unyielding beacon of underground creativity. While early internet fans will fondly remember dialing up the old Troma website to see the weekly spotlight on edgy, counter-culture Tromettes, these female figures were often relegated to sidekick status or damsels in distress. With Rise of the Super Tromettes, directed, written, and produced by Mercedes the Muse, the iconic women of this cinematic universe finally seize total control of the spotlight. The film delivers a hyper-vibrant, deeply chaotic, and aggressively low-budget addition to the Troma myth...

When director Renny Harlin burst onto the Hollywood scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he quickly established himself as a master of high-octane, unapologetically maximalist action cinema. Films like Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, and his 1999 aquatic horror masterpiece Deep Blue Sea proved that he knew exactly how to construct nail-biting suspense out of the most preposterous premises. In his 2026 survival thriller Deep Water, Harlin returns to the literal and figurative waters that defined the peak of his career. Merging the tense, multi-character melodrama of a classic 1970s airplane disaster film with the brutal, visceral terror of a modern creature feature, Deep Water emerges as a deeply satisfying, albeit highly formulaic, piece of popcorn entertainment. It is a film that fully understands its own pulp pedigree, refusing to wink condescendingly at the audience while delivering an unrelenting ride that successfully maximizes the simple dread of what might be swimming just beneath ...

Steven Soderbergh has spent the better part of the last few decades operating less like a traditional Hollywood auteur and more like a restless cinematic mechanic. He is the kind of director who will follow up a massive, star-studded studio hit with a micro-budget experiment shot entirely on a mobile phone, seemingly just to see if he can pull it off. This unpredictable streak makes his filmography incredibly erratic, but it also means that when he hits the sweet spot, the results are wildly entertaining. With his feature, The Christophers, working from a razor-sharp script by Ed Solomon, Soderbergh manages a particularly tricky tonal pivot. On paper, the project looks like a standard, slick art-world heist movie. In execution, however, it transforms into an intimate, blackly comedic chamber piece that cares far less about the mechanics of the crime than it does about family trauma, artistic ego, and the transactional nature of modern relationships. The narrative introduces us to Julia...

The history of independent cinema is cluttered with odd, forgotten mutations that exist at the exact crossroads of high art and low trash. One of the most fascinating artifacts from this twilight zone is Sugar Cookies, a 1973 psychosexual thriller that eventually found a unexpected home in the Troma Entertainment library. Long before Troma became synonymous with toxic mutants, exploding vehicles, and hyper-kinetic slapstick gore, the company’s co-founder, Lloyd Kaufman, was cutting his teeth on a completely different style of counterculture filmmaking. Co-written by Kaufman and director Theodore Gershuny, Sugar Cookies is a sleek, seedy, and surprisingly layered exploration of grief, exploitation, and identity. Originally slapped with an X rating before being re-edited, it stands out as a unique cinematic anomaly: an erotic B-movie that behaves like an art-house homage to Alfred Hitchcock. At the center of this sordid tale is Max Pavell, played with a greasy, manipulative charm by Geor...