FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Shelby Oaks is an ambitious and deeply personal horror film that wears its influences openly while still striving to carve out its own unsettling identity. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film arrives with a unique weight behind it, not only because of its genre aspirations but because it represents a critic turned filmmaker stepping directly into the medium he has analyzed for years. The result is a movie that feels both reverent toward horror history and intensely concerned with the emotional fallout of obsession, guilt, and belief. A particularly notable comparison is Roger Ebert, whose transition from criticism to filmmaking resulted in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, written with Russ Meyer. While the film is wildly different in tone and intent from Shelby Oaks, it stands as a reminder that critics have occasionally made bold, unconventional leaps into creation. Ebert’s script was unapologetically excessive, satirical, and deeply aware of the cinematic landscape it was commenting...

Frightmare from 1981, directed by Norman Thaddeus Vane, is a raw, abrasive slice of American regional horror that thrives on excess anger and outsider energy. Where many early eighties slashers leaned into formula and body count,s this film feels more like a scream of frustration blasted straight onto celluloid. It is messy mean spirited and frequently uncomfortable, but those qualities are exactly what give it its cult power. Frightmare is not interested in polish or restraint. It wants to disturb, provoke, and overwhelm. The story centers on Conrad Radzoff, a former mental patient recently released from an institution after years of confinement for violent crimes. He moves in with his sister and her husband and quickly begins to unravel under the pressures of normal life. His grip on reality is tenuous at best, and his violent urges are barely contained. As Conrad drifts from job to job and situation to situation, his resentment toward society builds, eventually exploding into a seri...

After years of anticipation, fan speculation, and internet mythology, Hazbin Hotel finally arrived as a full-fledged television series, and against long odds, it mostly lives up to the hype. Season 1 is loud, chaotic, profane, emotionally sincere, and unapologetically weird. It is also surprisingly thoughtful beneath the neon filth and musical mayhem. Creator Vivienne Medrano’s vision, once confined to a viral pilot and spin-off shorts, expands into a fully realized version of Hell that feels both satirical and strangely heartfelt. At its core, Hazbin Hotel is about redemption, an idea that sounds almost quaint until you place it in a setting where redemption is considered laughable at best and heretical at worst. Charlie Morningstar, Hell’s relentlessly optimistic princess, believes damned souls deserve a chance to rehabilitate themselves rather than face eternal extermination. This belief places her in direct conflict with Hell’s entrenched systems of power, violence, and apathy. Wha...

Apple TV+ launched The Morning Show as a prestige provocation: a glossy workplace drama that uses the rhythms of live television to interrogate power, gender, and the stories institutions tell to survive scandal. Across its first two seasons, the series oscillates between sharp satire and earnest melodrama, sometimes wobbling under the weight of its ambitions, but often landing with bracing emotional clarity. What emerges is a study of performance—on camera and off—and the price of being visible in systems designed to protect themselves. Season One arrives fueled by the shock of a sexual misconduct allegation against beloved anchor Mitch Kessler. Season Two pivots toward reckoning and aftermath, widening its lens to include accountability, public apology, and a world destabilized by crisis. Together, they form a diptych about complicity and courage, anchored by committed performances and an unusually tactile sense of workplace pressure. Season One: The Shattering of a Perfect Picture E...

Colin Minihan’s Coyotes is one of the most unexpectedly enjoyable thrillers of 2025, a tight, fiery, eco-horror adventure that blends creature-feature suspense with an intimate family drama. What could have easily become a campy “animals attack” movie instead emerges as a tense, stylish, emotionally resonant survival story that hits far above its weight class. The plot is straightforward but immediately gripping: a Hollywood Hills family, Scott (Justin Long), Liv (Kate Bosworth), and their teenage daughter Chloe (Mila Harris), becomes trapped in their home as wildfires rage nearby. The already volatile situation turns terrifying when a pack of coyotes, driven from their habitat and behaving with eerie coordination, surrounds the house. The genius of the setup is its layered tension. The fire, the darkness, the isolation, the failing communications, the smoke, all of it compounds into an atmosphere where anything could go wrong at any moment. The coyotes are just the final spark thrown ...

Splitsville is the kind of relationship comedy that refuses to cushion the viewer with predictable lessons or moral clarity. Instead, it embraces the tangled and often contradictory emotions that arise when people try to live by ideals they don’t fully understand. Directed by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, who also star, the film blends cringe humor, raw confession, and emotional chaos into a story that feels simultaneously absurd and painfully familiar. Rather than aiming for a tidy romantic arc, it leans into the reality that love in 2025 is frequently messy, self-contradictory, and full of poorly timed revelations. The story follows two couples who are closely connected and increasingly entangled. Carey, played by Marvin, and Ashley, portrayed with aching vulnerability by Adria Arjona, are a married pair trying to recover from a recent trauma that neither of them can articulate without stumbling. Their communication has become hesitant, and the sense of partnership that once...

If Together proves anything, it’s that the scariest thing about relationships isn’t breaking up — it’s merging so completely that you forget who you are. Director Michael Shanks takes this simple emotional idea and stretches it into something grotesque, romantic, and disturbingly funny. Starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, a real-life couple, the film turns domestic tension into body horror, letting metaphor and flesh literally fuse together. The movie begins in familiar territory: Tim (Franco), an aspiring musician stuck in creative limbo, and Millie (Brie), a driven teacher, move from the city to a quiet rural community. The change is meant to help them reconnect after years of drifting apart. Instead, the isolation highlights how incompatible they’ve become. Their arguments are small at first, about chores, career envy, unspoken resentment, but beneath the surface lies a deeper dread: what if love itself is the thing that’s killing them? That dread takes form when the couple stumbl...

In an era where Hollywood comedies are rare and the ones we do get feel airbrushed, cautious, or overly self-aware, The Naked Gun (2025) arrives like a custard pie hurled straight at the face of subtlety. Directed by Akiva Schaffer (Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), this revival of the classic spoof franchise doesn’t tiptoe around nostalgia; it sprints into chaos with a banana peel in one hand and a whoopee cushion in the other. The result is a film that takes more comedic swings in a single scene than some modern comedies attempt in their entire runtime. Not every joke lands, sure, but enough of them do, and often spectacularly, to make The Naked Gun (2025) one of the most flat-out enjoyable theatrical comedies in years. Stepping into the shoes of the late, great Leslie Nielsen was never going to be easy, but Liam Neeson approaches the role of Frank Drebin Jr., the son of the original disaster-magnet detective, with absolute commitment. The key here is...

When This Is Spinal Tap first premiered in 1984, few could have predicted that its deadpan take on rock and roll hubris would become one of the most quoted, beloved, and influential comedies in film history. Forty years later, Rob Reiner and the original trio, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, have returned to the amplifiers that once went “one louder.” The result, Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues, is a surprisingly tender, frequently hilarious love letter to aging artists, enduring friendship, and the absurd beauty of making noise together long after the world has stopped listening. It could have been a disaster. So many late-stage sequels stumble into the traps of nostalgia or self-parody. But Spinal Tap 2 largely sidesteps those pitfalls by doing something bold: it embraces its own age. This isn’t the swaggering, spandex-clad satire of 1984. This is a story about three men who once believed their music could shake arenas, and who now find meaning in shaking hands,...

The 2025 Smurfs reboot, directed by Chris Miller, arrives with a clear mission: to breathe new life into a beloved franchise while introducing the little blue icons to a generation raised on Encanto and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It’s a colorful, good-natured attempt that wears its heart on its sleeve. Backed by an A-list voice cast, Rihanna as Smurfette, John Goodman as Papa Smurf, and Natasha Lyonne, Sandra Oh, and Nick Offerman rounding out the ensemble, the film aims to balance nostalgia and modern energy. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s far from the disaster skeptics might have feared. Miller and his team deliver a lively, affectionate family film that may not redefine animation, yet succeeds in reminding us why the Smurfs have endured for over six decades. The story centers on Smurfette, who takes charge when Papa Smurf is kidnapped by the bumbling yet oddly sympathetic wizard Gargamel and his new accomplice Razamel. Her quest sends the Smurfs beyond their familiar mushroom ...

Ti West’s X trilogy, comprising X (2022), Pearl (2022), and MaXXXine (2024), is one of the most ambitious horror undertakings of the decade. Across three wildly different films, West and his creative partner and star Mia Goth dissect the intersecting ideas of ambition, aging, fame, and exploitation. On the surface, these are stylish genre pieces, slashers, psychodramas, and neo-noirs, but beneath that surface lies an incisive exploration of what it means to want to be seen and what one must sacrifice to achieve it. The films are connected through characters, but even more so through theme. In X, a group of young filmmakers in 1979 travels to rural Texas to shoot an adult film on an old couple’s property. What begins as a playful throwback to 1970s grindhouse quickly becomes a meditation on the fear of aging, the loss of youth, and the envy of vitality. The elderly hosts, Pearl and Howard, are both repulsed and fascinated by the youthful sexuality invading their farm. The killings that ...