FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Jean-Jacques Annaud's Enemy at the Gates came out back in 2001, right in that post- Saving Private Ryan sweet spot where Hollywood suddenly remembered WWII movies could be gritty, bloody, and massively profitable. But instead of the Normandy beaches, Annaud dragged us straight into the freezing, corpse-ridden rubble of Stalingrad in 1942. If you haven't seen it in a while, or if you only know it from cable TV re-runs, the story centers on Vassili Zaitsev, played by Jude Law with a questionable Russian accent that somehow still works. Vassili is a humble farm boy from the Urals who happens to be a crack shot with a rifle. After surviving the horrific opening charge across the Volga River, he gets picked up by Danilov, a Soviet political officer played by Joseph Fiennes. Danilov realizes the Red Army desperately needs a hero to boost morale, so he turns Vassili into a living propaganda legend through state newspapers. Before long, Vassili is picking off German officers left and...

Hold onto your slashers, because the original Scary Movie gang is coming back. Paramount Pictures just announced that the brand-new Scary Movie entry is hitting 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD on September 22nd, and it is bringing the core team along for the ride. It has been twenty-six years since the original spoof turned horror tropes on their head, and now Cindy, Brenda, Shorty, and Ray are getting dragged right back into the mess. Apparently, a fresh masked killer is on the loose, completely oblivious to the fact that this crew should probably be retired by now. What makes this actually exciting is the return of Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, and Regina Hall. Getting all four of them back in the same room feels like a tiny miracle, given how the franchise fragmented over the years. They are joining forces with director Michael Tiddes and a massive stacked cast that includes Kenan Thompson, Dave Sheridan, Lochlyn Munro, Kim Wayans, Cheri Oteri, Chris Elliott, Damon Wayans Jr., a...

Long before college movies devolved strictly into crude beer-pong comedies and frat house chaos, there was TAG: The Assassination Game. Released in 1982, this low-budget noir-thriller took a surprisingly dark look at campus life, and Synapse Films is finally giving it the revival it deserves. Restored in 2K directly from the original 35mm archival vault materials, this retro suspense piece lands on Blu-ray on September 9, 2026. The premise is brilliant in its simplicity. A group of college kids play a campus-wide game of assassin, using rubber-tipped dart guns to eliminate each other until only one player stands. It is the kind of game that absolutely would not fly on a college campus today. Things get messy when one bitter competitor decides he hates losing so much that he starts swapping out the toy darts for real bullets. The movie was written and directed by Nick Castle, who most horror fans know as the man inside the Michael Myers suit in John Carpenter's 1978 original Hallowe...

Hard to believe, but Star Trek is turning 60 this year. Gene Roddenberry's original sci-fi show launched back in 1966, sending Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the crew of the Enterprise on their iconic five-year mission. Sixty years later, Paramount is celebrating Star Trek Day on September 8 with a couple of brand-new home video releases. If you are a hardcore physical media collector, the big news here is the Amazon Exclusive Gift Set. It packs all three seasons and 79 episodes of The Original Series on Blu-ray into commemorative 60th-anniversary packaging. On top of the discs, the box set includes a set of limited-edition lobby cards featuring behind-the-scenes shots, a collectible logo reveal piece, and a 4-inch "Tiny Vinyl" record loaded with classic show themes and sound effects. If you don't need all the extra trinkets on your shelf, Paramount is also releasing a standard 60th Anniversary Edition of the complete series on both Blu-ray and DVD. These national releases ...

Dave Boyle is back, and if you've been following his career, you know he doesn't just stick to one lane. His latest project, Never After Dark , already picked up the SXSW Midnighter Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at Overlook, which usually means two things: it's weird, and it actually delivers on the genre promises. The story follows Airi, played by Shogun star Moeka Hoshi. She's a wandering medium who spends her days helping restless spirits move on, which sounds like standard horror territory until she gets called out to a creepy, isolated country home. There, she runs into a bizarre apparition that totally throws off her usual routine. But the real twist isn't the ghost. As Airi digs into the property's history, she realizes the biggest threat isn't supernatural at all. She ends up hunted by the living, which turns out to be way more unpredictable than dealing with dead people. It’s an interesting pivot for a exorcism-style story. Ghosts usually...

James McAvoy is finally stepping behind the camera for his directorial debut, and it sounds like a wild ride. His new film, California Schemin' , hits US theaters nationwide on October 9, 2026, before expanding further on October 16 and 23. It already premiered at TIFF to rave reviews and picked up a Certified Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, so the hype is very real. If you haven't heard the story yet, it's based on an absurdly true event. Two working-class Scottish kids want a record deal, but nobody takes them seriously. So, what do they do? They fake American accents, pretend to be Californian hip-hop artists, and somehow hustle their way into the industry. Seamus McLean Ross and Samuel Bottomley star as the two MCs, alongside Lucy Halliday, Rebekah Murrell, and McAvoy himself. McAvoy has wanted to direct since he was 16, and after 30 years in the industry, he decided to tackle a story close to his own roots. He wanted to highlight lower-income kids from council estates ...

 Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. We’ve all spent time in the healthcare system, whether it’s sitting in a sterile waiting room or trying to navigate a bureaucratic nightmare for a loved one. It’s a system run by people who are constantly expected to be flawless, even when they’re completely running on empty. That brings us to today's film, Do No Harm. The movie follows Sam Yeong, played by Harry Shum Jr., a home health nurse who is already burnt out to the point of collapse. In his exhaustion, he makes a single mistake, administering what might be a fatal dose of medication to a young patient. Instead of a clean medical drama where everything gets wrapped up with a nice moral lesson, the story spirals over 24 hours as Sam tries to cover his tracks while colliding head-on with the grieving father. It’s a tense, deeply uncomfortable look at moral injury, institutional pressure, and what happens when the people we expect to save us simply break under the weight. The cast ...

There is a specific strain of late nineties studio filmmaking that just doesn't exist anymore. It's that strange mid-budget threshold where executives would toss $60 million at a director, rent out post-Soviet Moscow for a few weeks, and let a peak-era movie star run around wearing ridiculous wigs while pretending to be a master thief. Paramount's 1997 take on The Saint is absolute prime vintage for this era. It isn't a great movie by traditional standards, but it's wildly entertaining, intensely nostalgic, and completely committed to its own ridiculous premise. Now, Paramount has finally brought it to 4K Ultra HD in a limited edition SteelBook, giving Val Kilmer’s parade of absurd accents a surprisingly pristine physical media home. If you grew up watching this on cable, you already know the vibe. Kilmer plays Simon Templar, a high-tech international thief for hire who names all his disguises after Catholic saints. He doesn't have a past, he doesn't have a ...

Popeye (1980) has always been one of the strange, beautiful disasters of American cinema. When Paramount and Disney dumped millions of dollars into a live-action musical adaptation of E.C. Segar’s comic strip, they probably expected a breezy, family-friendly blockbuster to rival Superman. What they got instead was a Robert Altman film. It was chaotic, murky, deeply weird, and endlessly eccentric. For years, it carried the reputation of a historic box-office bomb, even though it actually made decent money. Now, marking its 45th anniversary, Paramount has given this misunderstood oddity a full 4K UHD Blu-ray release. The result is a disc that makes a compelling case for why Altman’s bizarre passion project deserves a second look. The Film: Chaos in Sweethaven If you go into Popeye expecting the clean, punchy pacing of the classic Fleischer cartoons, you are going to be deeply confused. Altman was never interested in standard Hollywood narrative mechanics. Instead of a tight three-act sto...

Back in 1990, Jean-Claude Van Damme was on a run that felt pretty much unstoppable. Fresh off Bloodsport and Kickboxer, Cannon Films and MGM were trying to figure out every possible scenario to throw this high-kicking Belgian into. The solution for Death Warrant? Put him in a maximum-security prison, give him an undercover cop badge, and see how many inmates he can spin-kick before the standard 89-minute runtime ticks away. It is raw, sweaty, heavily standardized B-movie action, and MVD Rewind Collection has given it an absurdly lavish 4K UHD release that it honestly probably didn't know it deserved. If you haven't seen it in a while, the setup is delightfully absurd. Van Damme plays Louis Burke, a Canadian Mountie turned LAPD detective who gets assigned to go undercover as a convict at Harrison State Penitentiary. Why? Because prisoners are dying under mysterious circumstances, and the governor needs someone on the inside to investigate. Naturally, instead of taking notes or d...