FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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...

To look at the cultural landscape today is to see the fingerprints of Dr. Frank-N-Furter everywhere. Gender fluidity is a mainstream topic, camp aesthetics govern high-fashion red carpets, and the concept of interactive, communal cinema is a celebrated art form. Yet fifty years ago, the vessel that carried these ideas into the global consciousness was a destitute, bizarre British rock musical that bombed spectacularly during its initial American theatrical release. Directed by Linus O’Brien, the documentary Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror arrives as both a celebration and an interrogation of this survival story. Crucially, the filmmaker happens to be the son of Richard O’Brien, the eccentric genius who wrote the original stage show and played the cadaverous butler Riff Raff. This familial connection gives the film an emotional baseline that elevates it far above standard, talking-head nostalgia. Rather than settling for a standard chronological list of production trivia, Str...

The year 1990 was a transitional crossroads for Hollywood romance. On one side of the ledger, audiences were treated to the glossy, heavily sanitized fantasy of Pretty Woman, a film that corporate capitalism could easily digest. On the other side stood director Luis Mandoki’s White Palace, a sweatier, rowdier, and fundamentally more honest look at human connection. Based on Glenn Savan’s novel, the film is an interesting, deeply authentic artifact of an era when major studios still made explicit, character-driven adult dramas. While it falters under the weight of traditional Hollywood expectations in its final act, the picture remains an incredibly compelling study of how social class, profound grief, and ageism warp the architecture of a relationship. At the center of this collision are two individuals who should never have crossed paths. Max Baron, played with cold, repressed elegance by a twenty-seven-year-old James Spader, is a successful St. Louis advertising executive. Max is a n...

In the late summer of 1977, American cinema was undergoing a massive tectonic shift. Audiences were standing in lines wrapped around city blocks to escape into space-opera visuals, while the counter-culture grit of the early part of the decade was gradually giving way to slick, neon-drenched escapism. Tucked quietly behind these massive pop-culture milestones was a small, independently financed romantic melodrama that managed to carve out its own strange corner of history. That film was You Light Up My Life, a movie written, directed, produced, and scored by Joseph Brooks. While the film itself has largely faded into a historical footnote, its titular song became a towering behemoth of the late-seventies airwaves. Yet, looking past the shadow of its chart-topping theme song reveals a piece of cinema that is fascinatingly odd, deeply flawed, and uniquely representative of its era. The story centers on Laurie Robinson, played by Didi Conn in her first major leading role just a year befor...

The 1984 teen sex comedy Lovelines (frequently referred to as Love Lines) is a fascinating cultural artifact. Directed by Rod Amateau, a veteran of mid-century television sitcoms like The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, the film exists as a bizarre, hyper-saturated time capsule of mid-1980s American youth culture. It is a movie that attempts to be absolutely everything to everyone at a specific moment in cinematic history. It tries to function as a modern teen variation on Romeo and Juliet, a raunchy flesh-baring sex romp, a fully realized rock musical, a showcase for practical high school pranks, and a fourth-wall-breaking vehicle for Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame. By refusing to pick a single narrative lane, the film careens wildly between genres, delivering a viewing experience that is simultaneously exhausting, baffling, and undeniably entertaining for connoisseurs of pure vintage cheese. At its core, the thin narrative outline centers on an intense, cross-town rivalry between...

The late 1980s neon-noir landscape is littered with forgotten titles that briefly flared in video rental shops before vanishing into obscurity. Among these, the 1987 thriller Cold Steel occupies a fascinating, almost surreal position. Directed by Dorothy Ann Puzo, daughter of The Godfather author Mario Puzo, the film attempts to straddle the line between the gritty, psychological torment of early decade urban crime and the bombastic, explosive action of the emerging blockbusters. At its center is Brad Davis, an actor whose intense, trembling energy frequently threatened to burst the confines of standard genre cinema. Watched today, Cold Steel stands as a fascinating time capsule, a film of wild tonal shifts, remarkable character actors, and a frantic, sweaty desperation that feels entirely distinct from the slickly manufactured thrillers of modern cinema. The narrative structure of Cold Steel begins with an abrupt subversion of holiday cheer. Brad Davis plays Detective Johnny Modine, a...

The mid-1980s marked a distinct, hyper-kinetic era for Hollywood cinema, a period when the sudden explosion of MTV transformed the visual language of studio filmmaking. Pop music and synchronized choreography were no longer just elements of the classic studio musical, but instead became the vital tissue driving youth culture on screen. Within this landscape, a fascinating intersection occurred when Sidney Poitier, an icon of classical Hollywood dignity, stepped behind the camera to direct the 1985 dance drama Fast Forward. Coming off a string of successful comedies, Poitier shifted gears to capture the neon-soaked, synth-driven energy of the decade, resulting in a film that remains a fascinating, earnest, and deeply rhythmic artifact of its time. The narrative structure follows a blueprint that is comforting in its familiarity. A group of exceptionally talented, starry-eyed high school students from Sandusky, Ohio, calling themselves The Adventurous Eight, leave their small-town lives ...