FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

Suspect from 1987 is a legal thriller that blends courtroom drama with political intrigue and romance. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Cher, Dennis Quaid, and Liam Neeson, the film occupies a distinctive place in late nineteen eighties cinema. It is not a fast-paced or sensational thriller, but rather a measured and character-driven story that focuses on power, corruption, and moral responsibility within the American justice system. While it did not become a defining classic of the genre, Suspect remains a thoughtful and engaging film anchored by strong performances and a serious tone. The story follows Kathleen Riley, a public defender played by Cher, who is assigned to represent Carl Wayne Anderson, a deaf homeless man accused of murdering a government employee. Anderson is portrayed by Liam Neeson in a largely silent role that relies heavily on physical presence and emotional restraint. As Kathleen begins to investigate the case, she uncovers inconsistencies in the evidence and...

Pulse from 1988 is a quietly unsettling science fiction horror film that reflects a very specific cultural anxiety of its time. Directed by Paul Golding and starring Cliff DeYoung, the film takes a familiar suburban setting and turns it hostile through an unseen electrical force. While it never achieved mainstream success, Pulse has endured as a minor cult film, remembered less for spectacle and more for its atmosphere and unsettling ideas about technology, family, and trust. The story centers on David Rockland, a young boy who spends the summer with his father, Bill, following his parents’ divorce. Bill, played by Cliff DeYoung, lives with his new wife, Ellen, in a seemingly ordinary Los Angeles neighborhood. Almost immediately, David begins to notice strange and threatening behavior from the house itself. Lights flicker, appliances malfunction, and the electrical system seems to act with malicious intent. As the danger escalates, David finds himself struggling to convince the adults ...

Fackham Hall arrives as something of a minor miracle. At a time when theatrical comedies are increasingly rare and full-blooded parody films rarer still, it feels almost anachronistic to sit in a cinema and watch a movie whose primary goal is simply to make the audience laugh. Not chuckle politely or exhale through the nose, but laugh openly and often. That alone makes Fackham Hall worthy of attention, but the film justifies its existence far beyond novelty. I went into the film having only seen a handful of the properties it is parodying. I am certain there are references and genre specific jokes that passed me by entirely, aimed at viewers deeply familiar with a certain tradition of stately homes, hushed scandal, and rigid class structures. Yet the film never makes that a problem. It understands something essential about parody that many lesser examples forget. Recognition can enhance a joke, but it should never be the joke itself. Like the classic spoof films that inspired it, Fackh...

Icefall is a stark and tense survival thriller released in 2025 that places human desperation against the overwhelming power of nature. Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, the film attempts to combine crime drama, wilderness survival, and character-driven tension into a single frozen narrative. While it does not fully escape familiar genre patterns, Icefall succeeds in creating a cold atmospheric experience that is often gripping and occasionally haunting even when its storytelling falters. The story centers on Harlan, a Native American game warden played by Joel Kinnaman, who arrests a notorious poacher during a routine patrol in a remote frozen region. What initially appears to be a simple law enforcement encounter quickly spirals into something much more dangerous when Harlan learns that the poacher knows the location of a sunken plane filled with millions of dollars beneath the ice of a frozen lake. This revelation draws criminal interests into the area and forces uneasy alliances to fo...

Shelby Oaks is an ambitious and deeply personal horror film that wears its influences openly while still striving to carve out its own unsettling identity. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film arrives with a unique weight behind it, not only because of its genre aspirations but because it represents a critic turned filmmaker stepping directly into the medium he has analyzed for years. The result is a movie that feels both reverent toward horror history and intensely concerned with the emotional fallout of obsession, guilt, and belief. A particularly notable comparison is Roger Ebert, whose transition from criticism to filmmaking resulted in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, written with Russ Meyer. While the film is wildly different in tone and intent from Shelby Oaks, it stands as a reminder that critics have occasionally made bold, unconventional leaps into creation. Ebert’s script was unapologetically excessive, satirical, and deeply aware of the cinematic landscape it was commenting...

Frightmare from 1981, directed by Norman Thaddeus Vane, is a raw, abrasive slice of American regional horror that thrives on excess anger and outsider energy. Where many early eighties slashers leaned into formula and body count,s this film feels more like a scream of frustration blasted straight onto celluloid. It is messy mean spirited and frequently uncomfortable, but those qualities are exactly what give it its cult power. Frightmare is not interested in polish or restraint. It wants to disturb, provoke, and overwhelm. The story centers on Conrad Radzoff, a former mental patient recently released from an institution after years of confinement for violent crimes. He moves in with his sister and her husband and quickly begins to unravel under the pressures of normal life. His grip on reality is tenuous at best, and his violent urges are barely contained. As Conrad drifts from job to job and situation to situation, his resentment toward society builds, eventually exploding into a seri...

After years of anticipation, fan speculation, and internet mythology, Hazbin Hotel finally arrived as a full-fledged television series, and against long odds, it mostly lives up to the hype. Season 1 is loud, chaotic, profane, emotionally sincere, and unapologetically weird. It is also surprisingly thoughtful beneath the neon filth and musical mayhem. Creator Vivienne Medrano’s vision, once confined to a viral pilot and spin-off shorts, expands into a fully realized version of Hell that feels both satirical and strangely heartfelt. At its core, Hazbin Hotel is about redemption, an idea that sounds almost quaint until you place it in a setting where redemption is considered laughable at best and heretical at worst. Charlie Morningstar, Hell’s relentlessly optimistic princess, believes damned souls deserve a chance to rehabilitate themselves rather than face eternal extermination. This belief places her in direct conflict with Hell’s entrenched systems of power, violence, and apathy. Wha...

Apple TV+ launched The Morning Show as a prestige provocation: a glossy workplace drama that uses the rhythms of live television to interrogate power, gender, and the stories institutions tell to survive scandal. Across its first two seasons, the series oscillates between sharp satire and earnest melodrama, sometimes wobbling under the weight of its ambitions, but often landing with bracing emotional clarity. What emerges is a study of performance—on camera and off—and the price of being visible in systems designed to protect themselves. Season One arrives fueled by the shock of a sexual misconduct allegation against beloved anchor Mitch Kessler. Season Two pivots toward reckoning and aftermath, widening its lens to include accountability, public apology, and a world destabilized by crisis. Together, they form a diptych about complicity and courage, anchored by committed performances and an unusually tactile sense of workplace pressure. Season One: The Shattering of a Perfect Picture E...

Colin Minihan’s Coyotes is one of the most unexpectedly enjoyable thrillers of 2025, a tight, fiery, eco-horror adventure that blends creature-feature suspense with an intimate family drama. What could have easily become a campy “animals attack” movie instead emerges as a tense, stylish, emotionally resonant survival story that hits far above its weight class. The plot is straightforward but immediately gripping: a Hollywood Hills family, Scott (Justin Long), Liv (Kate Bosworth), and their teenage daughter Chloe (Mila Harris), becomes trapped in their home as wildfires rage nearby. The already volatile situation turns terrifying when a pack of coyotes, driven from their habitat and behaving with eerie coordination, surrounds the house. The genius of the setup is its layered tension. The fire, the darkness, the isolation, the failing communications, the smoke, all of it compounds into an atmosphere where anything could go wrong at any moment. The coyotes are just the final spark thrown ...

Splitsville is the kind of relationship comedy that refuses to cushion the viewer with predictable lessons or moral clarity. Instead, it embraces the tangled and often contradictory emotions that arise when people try to live by ideals they don’t fully understand. Directed by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, who also star, the film blends cringe humor, raw confession, and emotional chaos into a story that feels simultaneously absurd and painfully familiar. Rather than aiming for a tidy romantic arc, it leans into the reality that love in 2025 is frequently messy, self-contradictory, and full of poorly timed revelations. The story follows two couples who are closely connected and increasingly entangled. Carey, played by Marvin, and Ashley, portrayed with aching vulnerability by Adria Arjona, are a married pair trying to recover from a recent trauma that neither of them can articulate without stumbling. Their communication has become hesitant, and the sense of partnership that once...

If Together proves anything, it’s that the scariest thing about relationships isn’t breaking up — it’s merging so completely that you forget who you are. Director Michael Shanks takes this simple emotional idea and stretches it into something grotesque, romantic, and disturbingly funny. Starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, a real-life couple, the film turns domestic tension into body horror, letting metaphor and flesh literally fuse together. The movie begins in familiar territory: Tim (Franco), an aspiring musician stuck in creative limbo, and Millie (Brie), a driven teacher, move from the city to a quiet rural community. The change is meant to help them reconnect after years of drifting apart. Instead, the isolation highlights how incompatible they’ve become. Their arguments are small at first, about chores, career envy, unspoken resentment, but beneath the surface lies a deeper dread: what if love itself is the thing that’s killing them? That dread takes form when the couple stumbl...

In an era where Hollywood comedies are rare and the ones we do get feel airbrushed, cautious, or overly self-aware, The Naked Gun (2025) arrives like a custard pie hurled straight at the face of subtlety. Directed by Akiva Schaffer (Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), this revival of the classic spoof franchise doesn’t tiptoe around nostalgia; it sprints into chaos with a banana peel in one hand and a whoopee cushion in the other. The result is a film that takes more comedic swings in a single scene than some modern comedies attempt in their entire runtime. Not every joke lands, sure, but enough of them do, and often spectacularly, to make The Naked Gun (2025) one of the most flat-out enjoyable theatrical comedies in years. Stepping into the shoes of the late, great Leslie Nielsen was never going to be easy, but Liam Neeson approaches the role of Frank Drebin Jr., the son of the original disaster-magnet detective, with absolute commitment. The key here is...

When This Is Spinal Tap first premiered in 1984, few could have predicted that its deadpan take on rock and roll hubris would become one of the most quoted, beloved, and influential comedies in film history. Forty years later, Rob Reiner and the original trio, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, have returned to the amplifiers that once went “one louder.” The result, Spinal Tap 2: The End Continues, is a surprisingly tender, frequently hilarious love letter to aging artists, enduring friendship, and the absurd beauty of making noise together long after the world has stopped listening. It could have been a disaster. So many late-stage sequels stumble into the traps of nostalgia or self-parody. But Spinal Tap 2 largely sidesteps those pitfalls by doing something bold: it embraces its own age. This isn’t the swaggering, spandex-clad satire of 1984. This is a story about three men who once believed their music could shake arenas, and who now find meaning in shaking hands,...