FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993) is as much a Rorschach test as it is a smog-choked thriller. Released at a point of intense cultural volatility in American history, specifically on the heels of the 1992 Los Angeles riots that exploded after the acquittal of 4 LAPD officers who beat Rodney King on videotape, and during an economic recession that left white-collar workers feeling increasingly precarious, the film captured a precise, ugly, and resonant cultural nerve. Viewed today, it feels less like a relic of the nineties and more like an uncanny, predictive text for the modern landscape of alienation, political polarization, and online radicalization. It is a film about the fracturing of the American Dream, told through the perspective of a man who believed the marketing copy, only to find himself bankrupt in a world that no longer recognizes him. The narrative architecture of the film is deceptively simple, adopting a classic Odyssean structure transposed onto the gridlocked asp...

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...

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...

Kristoffer Borgli has carved out a genuinely weird, unsettling niche in modern cinema. He loves poking at the fragile ways we build our egos and social identities, and with The Drama, he moves away from the viral internet infamy of his previous work to tear apart something much older: the deeply performative ritual of a modern wedding. On paper, it sounds like a standard psychological thriller or a pitch-black comedy about domestic secrets. In reality, the movie functions as a relentless, high-stress endurance test of what unconditional love actually means. Borgli doesn't just tell a story; he weaponizes the audience's expectations, flipping a standard romantic setup on its head to create something deeply deeply uncomfortable. It moves with the slow, agonizing inevitability of a car crash you can't look away from. To get the full, gut-punch effect of what he’s doing here, you absolutely have to walk into the theater knowing as close to zero as possible. The marketing did a ...

Approaching a seventh entry in an animated franchise naturally invites a certain degree of skepticism. When it was revealed that Pierre Coffin and Patrick Delage were bringing the denim-clad, yellow agents of mayhem back to theaters in Minions and Monsters , anticipating franchise fatigue felt completely justified. In a studio ecosystem that frequently prioritizes safe, corporate formulas over creative exploration, the massive cultural presence of these characters can easily overshadow the genuine artistry that built them. However, stepping out of the theater alongside my ten-year-old son, I was struck by a rare and incredibly welcome realization: this project is far more than a studio meeting a box-office requirement. Minions and Monsters serves as a gorgeous, deeply affectionate, and remarkably poignant tribute to the dawn of cinema, a film that wears its enormous, beating heart openly on its yellow sleeve. The story transports audiences back to 1927, capturing Old Hollywood in the ...

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 film I Swear is a work of profound empathy that arrives at a moment when cinema feels increasingly preoccupied with spectacle over the intricacies of the human condition. It is a film that refuses to blink, yet its gaze is never intrusive; it is a film that demands we look closer, not at a diagnosis, but at a person. As a father to a neurodivergent child, watching this film wasn’t just a cinematic experience: it was an act of recognition. It felt like someone had finally handed me a mirror that didn’t just reflect the surface of our lives, but the deep, often turbulent, and vibrantly colorful currents that run beneath it. For so long, the stories told about families like mine have felt like they were written by observers looking through a glass partition. They capture the behaviors, the clinical definitions, and the external stressors, but they often miss the soul. I Swear finds that soul and lets it breathe. The brilliance of I Swear lies in its commitment to the small moments. In...

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...

Joe Dante is a mad scientist of the suburban variety. He takes the familiar comforts of our living rooms and the mundane routines of our lives, then he injects them with a frantic cartoon energy that feels like it might burst at the seams. Seeing Innerspace for the first time on a grainy VHS tape back when I was eleven or twelve years old felt like discovering a secret transmission from a much cooler, more chaotic dimension. My parents had a top-loading VCR in our basement that made a heavy mechanical clunk when you pushed the tape down, and that sound was the starting bell for a journey into the microscopic. Back then, I didn’t know who Dennis Quaid was and was only familiar with Martin Short as Ed Grimley, but to me, after watching Innerspace, they were the two halves of a perfect comedic brain. The movie starts with a premise that should be terrifying, a miniaturized pilot injected into the body of a hypochondriac grocery clerk, but Dante turns it into a high-speed chase that never ...

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 ...