FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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...

The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and written by Eric Roth, really doesn’t play by the usual spy movie rules. Forget the fast-paced fights and car chases you’d get with Jason Bourne. This movie moves with a cold, measured chill, almost clinical. It digs into the early days of the CIA, charting a path from 1939 to 1961, and centers on Edward Wilson, a guy so bottled up, you sometimes wonder if there’s anything left alive inside him. Matt Damon gives him this strange, haunted presence. His experience in Yale’s Skull and Bones and the grit from surviving WWII carve away whatever warmth he once had. Watching him change from a sensitive, poetry-reading student to a hardened counter-intelligence officer, you start to see the birth of America’s old-boy, secret society elite, where loyalty to the club comes before honesty to the country. Wilson doesn’t just fit into this world, he’s completely swallowed by it. The heart of the story is the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, a botched atte...

If you haven’t seen Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966), imagine something way stranger and sweatier than your typical mid-sixties thriller. It’s like watching a town on the edge of a nervous breakdown, the kind of feverish drama that feels both old-fashioned and disturbingly ahead of its time. Sam Spiegel produced it, Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay (based on Horton Foote's work), and the result is messy, ambitious, and totally gripping. There’s this wild clash: Old Hollywood glitz against the dark, chaotic mood of New Hollywood. In the middle stands Marlon Brando, looking tired, grounded, and quietly heroic while everyone else spirals into madness. Honestly, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ari Aster’s Eddington when I watched it, another film that dives headfirst into messy polarization. The story seems straightforward at first: Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) escapes prison. He’s not some sinister outlaw, just unlucky as hell, but his return to Tarl, Texas, basically rips the mask...

If you’d stepped into a Milwaukee dive bar back in the nineties, there’s a damn good chance you would’ve run into Mike and Claire Sardina. They weren’t just some random tribute act working the weekend shift; they were a local institution, two dreamers who managed to turn a shared obsession with Neil Diamond into a lifelong survival strategy. The new film Song Sung Blue captures that specific brand of Midwestern grit perfectly—the kind of life that’s draped in cheap sequins and hairspray but still smells like a long, honest Tuesday night shift at a neighborhood hair salon. It’s a story about the beauty found in the imitation of greatness and the very real stakes of living a life on the fringes of the spotlight, and honestly, it’s one of the most grounded musical biopics I've seen in years. The movie kicks off in 1987 at the Wisconsin State Fair, which is pretty much the ultimate setting for a story about salt-of-the-earth dreams. We meet Mike, a guy with a massive voice and an even ...

Hanky Panky is one of those films that feels like it was built almost entirely around the personality of its star. Released in 1982 and directed by Sidney Poitier, it pairs Gene Wilder with Gilda Radner in a comic thriller that mixes mistaken identity, espionage, and romantic comedy. It is not usually listed among Wilder’s greatest achievements, yet it has a curious charm that makes it worth revisiting, especially for anyone interested in his screen persona during the early eighties. The story centers on Michael Jordon, played by Wilder, an architect in New York who lives a tidy and unremarkable life. His routine is upended when a mysterious woman asks him to deliver a package and then disappears under violent circumstances. Before he can process what has happened, he is mistaken for someone else and pulled into a conspiracy involving stolen government documents. Wilder’s character is perpetually confused, exasperated, and frightened, which of course is where much of the comedy comes f...

Heaven is a deeply personal and unconventional documentary, one that reflects Diane Keaton’s lifelong fascination with spirituality, architecture, memory, and the unseen forces that shape human belief. Rather than offering a journalistic investigation or a rigid theological argument, Keaton approaches the subject of heaven as a question, an idea filtered through culture, art, history, and personal reflection. The result is a meditative, impressionistic film that feels less like a documentary in the traditional sense and more like a cinematic essay, guided by curiosity rather than certainty. From the outset, Heaven makes clear that it is not interested in defining heaven as a single, authoritative concept. Keaton structures the film around a series of encounters with artists, architects, scholars, clergy, and everyday people, each offering their own interpretation of what heaven means to them. These perspectives range from religious doctrine to secular metaphor, from literal belief in a...