FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. On today’s episode, I’m talking with VFX supervisors Paul Lambert and Mag Sarnowska about their work on Project Hail Mary . The film just hit home video, so you can pick it up right now on 4K Blu-ray, DVD, or digital. Honestly, it’s easily one of the best movies to come out all year, so if you haven't seen it yet, you need to change that. For those unfamiliar, the movie follows Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship with zero memory of who he is or how he got there. As his memory slowly comes back, he realizes he’s humanity's last hope to stop an extinction-level threat that's consuming the sun. He has to rely on pure science, trial and error, and an unexpected partnership with an alien engineer named Rocky to figure out a way to save Earth. What makes the film work so well—and why talking to Paul and Mag was so great—is how it grounds all this massive visual scale in practical problem-sol...

By 1988, the Brat Pack phenomenon was starting to feel a little tired. Audiences had spent years watching Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy navigate teenage angst, prom stress, and upper-middle-class privilege in high-gloss John Hughes productions. Fresh Horses tried to be something different. Directed by David Anspaugh right after his massive hit with Hoosiers, this film attempted to strip away the pop-synth gloss and throw those same iconic faces into a darker, sweatier, and far more cynical look at class divides and bad decisions. It did not hit with audiences back then, and it remains one of the weirdest artifacts of late 80s youth cinema. Now that it is available to own on Blu-ray from Alliance Entertainment, it is worth taking a look back at why this strange little melodrama lands the way it does. Andrew McCarthy plays Matt Larkin, a squeaky-clean Cincinnati college student who has his entire life mapped out on a silver platter. He has a rich fiancee, a solid family path, and an...

There is something deeply satisfying about watching a show that knows exactly what it is and refuses to apologize for it. We live in an era of prestige streaming where every action thriller feels obligated to spend half its runtime contemplating the moral weight of violence, forcing antiheroes into brooding existential crises while the camera slow-pans across a muted landscape. Reacher has never had time for that nonsense. It is a show about a giant man who walks into bad situations, notices things ordinary people miss, and breaks wrists when the talking stops working. Season Three takes that formula, strips away a lot of the suburban bloat from Season Two, and grounds itself in a lean, mean, classic noir setup. Adapting Lee Child's Persuader , this season drops Jack Reacher into coastal Maine under deep cover inside a massive criminal operation run by the shadowy Zachary Beck. Right off the bat, the narrative engine feels different. In previous outings, Reacher was the unstoppable...

When Paramount announced they were spinning Kayce Dutton off into his own procedural, I fully expected a hollow victory lap for a franchise that had already started running low on gas. The mother ship spent its final years suffocating under its own weight, trading away genuine character tension for melodrama and repetitive ranch politics. Moving Kayce into an elite U.S. Marshals unit felt, on paper, like the safest possible pivot. It sounded like an excuse to churn out weekly procedural beats for broadcast TV, slapping a badge on a familiar face and calling it a day. Having sat through all thirteen episodes on Paramount’s 3-disc Blu-ray release, I have to admit the reality is considerably weirder and more uneven than that. Marshals Season 1 is caught in an identity crisis. Half the time, it wants to be a gritty, character-driven look at broken men trying to process trauma through state-sanctioned violence. The other half, it succumbs to basic CBS network formula, complete with tidy epi...

When Amazon MGM Studios first announced they were turning Leonie Swann's novel Three Bags Full into a live-action CGI hybrid movie, I will admit I rolled my eyes pretty hard. It sounded like the exact kind of late-stage IP cash grab cooked up in a studio boardroom after someone saw a chart showing that cozy British murder mysteries and talking animals both make money. On paper, pitching Hugh Jackman as a doomed shepherd who reads Agatha Christie books to his livestock before getting murdered sounds like a fake movie trailer you would see inside a satirical comedy. Then the actual film dropped in theaters under the revised title The Sheep Detectives , and a funny thing happened: it was actually good. Not just acceptable for a Sunday afternoon watch with kids, but genuinely clever, weirdly melded in its tone, and far more emotionally layered than any movie featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus voicing an inquisitive ewe has any right to be. Now that Sony and Amazon MGM have shoved the disc ...

Jim Jarmusch is back, and if you have spent any time with his filmography over the last forty years, you pretty much know what you are getting into before you even pop the disc into the tray. Father Mother Sister Brother isn’t here to reinvent the wheel, nor is it trying to blow your mind with massive narrative twists. It is three short stories about family, distance, and the weird, awkward silence that sits in the room when adult children have to talk to their aging parents. If you like watching talented actors linger in doorways, sip coffee, and navigate minor misunderstandings, this is going to be right up your alley. If you need a movie to have a traditional three-act structure with high-stakes resolution, this will probably drive you nuts. The film is split into three distinct chapters set in different parts of the globe, each focusing on a different set of adult siblings trying to relate to a parent. First up is "Father," set in the northeastern US, featuring Adam Driv...

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...