FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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 ...

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...

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...

  Johannes Roberts, the director who famously turned the ocean into a claustrophobic death trap in 47 Meters Down, is trading shark-infested waters for a sun-drenched Hawaiian villa in his latest horror-thriller, Primate. Scheduled for release on Blu-ray and DVD on April 21st, the film follows Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) as her tropical homecoming turns into a desperate struggle for survival. What begins as a relaxing reunion with friends quickly spirals into "terrifying chaos" when the family’s exceptionally intelligent chimpanzee, Ben, enters a savage, rabid frenzy. With her father away and the group trapped in their remote island estate, the once-trusted pet becomes a lethal predator, transforming a luxury paradise into a bloody prison. The home media release, distributed by Paramount Pictures, offers an extensive look behind the curtain of this "cinematic nightmare." Fans can dive into a full-length commentary track featuring Roberts and producer Walter Hamada, or ex...

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...

Watching Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man felt a little strange at first, mostly because going back into that world after the series ended already carries a lot of weight. The Shelby story has always been tied to the smoke and grit of Birmingham and the trauma left behind by the First World War, and this movie really leans into that feeling again. But instead of trying to top the scale of the later seasons, it feels more reflective. It almost plays like a long look at Tommy Shelby as a person rather than just the legend everyone sees him as. Picking up after the finale, the story doesn’t rush to prove why it needs to exist. It takes its time, and that actually worked for me. The movie steps away from the big political games that dominated the later seasons and focuses much more on Tommy himself. There’s a sense that he’s carrying the full weight of everything that’s happened across the series, and the film lets that sit with you. The title, The Immortal Man, really stuck with me while ...

Blue Sunshine (1977), written and directed by Jeff Lieberman, occupies a strange and unforgettable corner of 1970s horror cinema. Neither a conventional slasher nor a supernatural shocker, it is a paranoid conspiracy thriller disguised as a grindhouse exploitation film. Its central image—otherwise ordinary people suddenly going violently insane and losing their hair in clumps, might sound absurd on paper. Yet the film transforms that pulpy premise into something genuinely unsettling and, at times, eerily plausible. At first glance, Blue Sunshine seems to fit right in with the low-budget horror of its era, coming out around the same time as heavy hitters like Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But Lieberman’s film actually predates the slasher boom. It feels closer in spirit to paranoid thrillers like the '78 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the political distrust found in The Parallax View. Rather than centering on a masked killer, the movie builds dread around ...

If you want to understand the exact moment that high fantasy on the big screen transitioned from campy fairy tales into something visceral, blood-soaked, and operatic, you have to look at John Boorman’s 1981 masterpiece, Excalibur. Long before Peter Jackson brought a literalist grit to Middle-earth, Boorman was out in the Irish countryside capturing a version of the Arthurian legend that feels less like a history lesson and more like a collective fever dream. It is a film that exists in a state of constant, shimmering intensity, where every suit of armor glows with an otherworldly chrome and every forest seems to be breathing. It is easily one of the most beautiful and deeply strange movies ever made, and it remains the definitive cinematic take on the rise and fall of Camelot. The story follows the entire arc of the legend, starting with the brutal, rain-slicked nights of Uther Pendragon and ending with the misty departure to Avalon. What makes Boorman’s approach so unique is that he ...

If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like if an Italian filmmaker tried to rip off The Omen, Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind simultaneously while high on espresso and fever dreams, you’ll find your answer in the 1979 madness that is The Visitor. This isn't just a movie; it’s a psychedelic artifact of a time when the cinematic rulebook was thrown out the window in favor of pure "vibes" and avian-based violence. The film opens in a blinding white void where an intergalactic warrior named Jerzy—played with a magnificent, weary gravitas by the legendary John Huston—meets a cosmic, bald Christ-figure played by Franco Nero. They are surrounded by dozens of bald children in a scene that looks like a high-fashion cult meeting. They are locked in a multi-dimensional war against "Sateen," an ancient evil force whose genetic legacy is currently manifesting on Earth in the form of a foul-mouthed eight-year-old girl named Katy who lives in Atlanta. It...

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 ...

I went into Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 totally expecting the standard sequel escalation, you know, bigger jumps, louder stings, and animatronics dialed up to nightmare levels. I figured the studio would just take the "more is more" approach that usually kills horror franchises by the second installment. But honestly? The movie actually knows exactly what it’s trying to be, and it stays remarkably disciplined. It’s "gateway horror" in the truest sense. It’s built for tweens who want the thrill of being scared without the actual lifelong trauma of a hard-R slasher, and it handles that balance with a ton of confidence. It understands that for a ten-year-old, the sound of a mechanical joint clicking in a dark hallway is way more effective than a bucket of fake blood. The film sets the stakes early with a heavy flashback to 1982, showing us the origin of the tragedy at the very first Freddy’s location. It’s a grim opening that establishes the long-standing rivalry and the...