FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Let's get this out of the way first: Hadestown was not intended to be a traditional Broadway blockbuster, and its reaching the Walter Kerr Theatre is practically a miracle. What began as a DIY 2006 community theater production mounted in a school bus touring Vermont by Anaïs Mitchell has been through conceptual indie-folk albums, an Off-Broadway run at New York Theatre Workshop, Edmonton, London's National Theatre, and finally a sweep of the 2019 Tony Awards. With this physical home release, capturing the performance on disc, we can see how it holds up when removed from the dark auditorium and placed on the living room television. Short answer first: It holds up surprisingly well, if lacking some theater sweat, though we lose a little bit of the rawness that makes theater unique. But before getting into the technical specs of the transfer and the audio mix, it's a good idea to discuss the merits of the production: what makes Hadestown tick, what the special qualities were o...

Some movies go off the rails purely by accident, runaway studio budgets, corporate micromanagement, or well-meaning creatives hopelessly out of their depth. Some of these trainwrecks are fascinating and endlessly rewatchable. Then there are the movies that feel like they were summoned directly into existence by the internet's darkest, most reactive algorithms, crafted specifically to pick scab after scab of the modern culture war. Citizen Vigilante belongs firmly to that second category. You can't sit through it without realizing you are looking at one of the weirdest artifacts of modern bargain-bin cinema, a project that feels less like a narrative motion picture and more like a fevered comment section brought to life. Uwe Boll directed, wrote, shot, and produced the film, a filmmaker whose name carries over twenty-five years of infamous baggage. Boll spent the early 2000s terrorizing video game fans with cheaply made adaptations like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and ...

Taylor Sheridan has reached the point in his career where tossing the Stetson on the coffee table and inviting the camera to a particularly photogenic corner of Montana constitutes a production meeting. After filling prime-time television with alpha males, land wars, and enough testosterone to fuel a small city, The Madison is his most surprisingly forlorn work yet. And now that its first season has appeared on Blu-ray, discerning viewers can enjoy Sheridan’s latest family drama without a subscription to any streaming service. The Madison is not another Yellowstone, it's a more introspective affair that examines the heart-wrenching consequences of the family tragedies and the inability to move on, despite all the money in the world. Michelle Pfeiffer stars as Manhattan socialite Stacy Clyburn, who finds herself in the unfamiliar landscape of the American West after a horrifying family tragedy. There, in the Madison River Valley, her husband Preston (Kurt Russell) and brother-in-law...

Look, nobody expects a Jackass movie to be high art, but there's something weirdly surreal about watching a bunch of people who have spent more than twenty-five years making bodily harm an art form make one more theatrical stab at it. Johnny Knoxville and his band of self-destructive masochists have leapt, crashed, collided, vomited and generally abused themselves to provide generations of viewers with entertainment. Jackass: Best and Last marks the franchise's supposed final theatrical outing, and the Blu-ray gives the film a solid technical presentation that suits the deliberately varied material. If you've seen Jackass Forever in 2022, you already know the basic emotional territory of this movie. It's a continuation of that last film's bruised family-reunion atmosphere, with the veterans increasingly aware that they're not quite as indestructible as they used to be. Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Danger Ehren, Dave England, Wee Man, Preston Lacy, Chris Pontius an...

If you grew up rent-scrolling the family section at blockbuster or your local mom-and-pop store in the late 90s, Peter Hewitt's 1997 adaptation of The Borrowers was an inescapable pick. It sat between Home Alone knockoffs and weird live-action Disney experiments, with a cover of a microscopic family peeking out from under a floorboard while John Goodman loomed over like an angry, suit-wearing thumb. It was a movie you rented when every copy of Space Jam was checked out, brought home on a rainy Saturday, and realized was actually just a weird, chaotic affair. Alliance Entertainment has put it out on a Blu-ray under their Retro VHS banner, complete with a heavy-cardstock slipcover to mimic a sun-faded tape box with fake sticker distress and black spine edges. Let us be real about what you are getting on the disc itself. It is a completely barebones package. You slot the disc into your player and get a dead-simple static menu with a play button and a scene selection menu. There are no...

Robert Benton's Nadine is one of those mid-80s studio comedies that passed everyone by as it opened in 1987, and eventually found a home on the cable television for the next decade. If you happened to randomly switch channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon in 1994, there is a good chance you caught the middle forty minutes of the movie without ever figuring out what the plot is about. It hits BD on September 29th as part of Alliance Entertainment's Retro VHS collection, and the packaging format is fitting for a film of this kind. It is wrapped in a faux-distressed slipcase with the look of a sun-faded rental cassette from a mom-and-pop video shop in 1989. The disc inside is bare bones; you drop it in, and you get a bare-minimum menu screen, and the movie starts. There are no retrospective interviews, no director commentary, no archival behind-the-scenes coverage. Just eighty-three minutes of Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger yelling at each other in late-1950s Texas while running away ...

Taylor Sheridan's recent output has been the work of a man with a factory cranked to full capacity. Some of the products that have come off the assembly line have been a bit stale, but Landman is the one show where the machine has hit the perfect RPMs. Mean, funny, and a little bit messy, it's right in the wheelhouse of high budget daddy TV that knows exactly what it is. While season one was getting us to know the volatile grease-stained world of West Texas oil, season two sees everything involved in it coming to the realization that the ground could be swallowed at any second. Billy Bob Thornton remains the heart of the production as Tommy Norris, who is the type of guy who only comes to life with the kind of weary, ash-dusted charisma that makes you think he's been up for 72 hours straight sipping lukewarm diner coffee and negotiating with cartels, environmental lawyers, and corporate idiots who wouldn't know a drill bit from a hole in the wall. Watching Thornton mane...

Every decade or so, Hollywood decides the time is right to reinvent the absurd vehicle comedy. We've had runaway buses and subways and now we have Stop! That! Train!, a movie which takes an absurd premise so ludicrous a five year old could make up on the spot while eating sugary cereal and stretches it to a full ninety-eight minutes! Directed by Adam Shankman is the precise type of mid-budget studio comedy that used to dominate multiplexes on a random Friday in April. It does not attempt to rewrite the rules of high cinema, but rather to toss a wacked out mix of recognizable comic actors and fabulous drag performers onto a train going too fast and see who sweats off their makeup first before the end credits roll. The premise is as hilariously straightforward as you'd expect. We follow a disgraced former transit authority engineer who happens to be riding a commuter train on the exact day which a bizarre computer glitch or disgruntled villain sabotage renders the breaking system...

There was a period in the early 1980s when college campuses in movies were lawless microcosms; before every square inch of a university was watched over by omnipresent surveillance or bogged down by hyper-connected modern anxiety, you could run around a quad at two in the morning playing elaborate live-action assassination games with dart guns without instantly getting swatted. TAG: The Assassination Game (1982) encapsulates that period, it is not a pretentious cinematic statement and it is certainly not an transformative work, rather it is a slightly goofy, surprisingly tense budget thriller about kids taking a silly game too seriously until one of them snaps and starts using real bullets. The movie was directed by Nick Castle who most horror fans know best as the physical presence behind Michael Myers in John Carpenter's original Halloween, but you can see he learned a lot while working on set and understands how to use shadows, how to frame a hallway to look threatening and how ...

If you spent any reasonable amount of time lurking in the horror aisles of mom-and-pop video stores back in the VHS era, you definitely know the original cover art for Graduation Day. It had that wild, arresting close-up of a terrified woman's face with an axe shattering right through glass, anchored by that bold red title text. It was pure slasher gold, the exact kind of sleeve art that practically begged a bored teenager on a Friday night to shell out three bucks. The actual movie, as is often the case with early 80s regional schlock, doesn't quite match the insane intensity implied on the box, but it's got a weird, chaotic charm that makes it hard to completely dismiss. Released in 1981, right in the thick of the post-Halloween gold rush, Graduation Day tries to do a few different things at once and mostly stumbles through all of them. The setup is straightforward enough: a high school track star named Laura suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack right after winning a 100-...

If you grew up hanging out in video rental stores in the mid-90s, chances are the box art for the original 1991 The Guyver movie caught your eye. It had Mark Hamill on the cover, a slick alien suit, and promised a crazy live-action anime adaptation. Then you took it home and realized Hamill turned into a giant cockroach monster, the tone was goofy camp, and the fighting felt completely muted. It was a letdown, plain and simple. But three years later, director Steve Wang came back to direct the sequel, Guyver: Dark Hero , on a shoestring budget without Hollywood execs breathing down his neck. He ended up making one of the most unapologetically cool creature-feature action movies of the entire decade. Now we finally have the film making its Blu-ray debut with a brand new master transferred from the best surviving film elements. It is a physical media release that cult movie nerds have been waiting years to get their hands on. It strips away the PG-13 silliness of the first movie and goe...