FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

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...

When I first saw the teaser trailer for Exit 8, I was cautiously optimistic; original high-concept films like this scratch a special Cube-shaped itch that I'm a sucker for. But when my teenage son saw it, he immediately recognized it. He pointed out that it was based on The Exit 8, a four-dollar indie tech demo on Steam that went viral on Twitch a while back. He explained the whole concept to me: you walk down the same sterile, yellow-tiled Japanese subway corridor over and over again. If you notice a weird anomaly like a poster expanding, a light flickering, or a creepy guy sprinting at you, you turn around. If everything looks normal, you keep walking until you hit Exit 8. That is the whole thing. It takes about forty minutes to finish, and half the fun for his age group is just watching streamers jump out of their chairs when a door disappears. On paper, taking a four-dollar memory game with zero plot and stretching it into a feature-length film could easily look like a cheap gi...

Blake Edwards was always at his absolute best when he was backing himself into a corner where the only way out was pure, unadulterated absurdity. By 1984, the man had already given us the slapstick mayhem of the Pink Panther movies and the Hollywood satire of S.O.B. , but Micki & Maude might be one of his most deeply chaotic setups. It's a comedy about a guy who gets two women pregnant at the exact same time, panics, marries them both, and then spends the next hour and a half trying to keep them from finding out while managing two wildly different domestic lives. If you pitched that script today, it would probably get tossed out the window before you even finished the logline, or at the very least, it would be turned into a dark, gritty psychological thriller about a pathologically dishonest liar. But back in the mid-80s, with Dudley Moore in the lead role, it somehow becomes a breezy, hysterical, and surprisingly charming farce. It shouldn't work. The protagonist is, on ...

If you only know Judd Nelson as the rebellious, soft-hearted criminal from The Breakfast Club , watching him in William Lustig's Relentless is going to give you some serious whiplash. He is still playing a guy with a bad attitude and a leather jacket, but this time around, there is no redemptive dance sequence at the end. Instead, he spends ninety minutes sweating, staring with massive dark circles under his eyes, and strangling random people he finds in the white pages. Relentless came out in 1989, right at the tail end of a decade that was absolutely obsessed with gritty, sun-bleached Los Angeles crime thrillers. It sits in that comfortable, slightly greasy space between a theatrical police procedural and a straight-to-video slasher. It is not trying to reinvent the wheel, but it has a raw, mean energy that makes it incredibly easy to watch, even when the plot logic starts to stretch thin. The movie follows two LAPD detectives who are trying to track down a killer the media has...

Revenge movies usually try to sell you some big, clean moral lesson about how violence only breeds more violence, or how seeking vengeance is like digging two graves. They want you to feel bad for wanting the bad guy to get his skull caved in. Aleshea Harris’ film adaptation of her own play, Is God Is, does not care about any of that moral hand-wringing. It is a mean, funny, blood-splattered Southern Gothic western that looks at trauma and says, yeah, some people just need to die, and the people killing them are probably going to ruin their own lives doing it, but we are going to watch every messy second of it anyway. If you are coming into this expecting a glossy, prestige thriller, you are going to get hit in the face with something much weirder. The movie is based on Harris’ award-winning play, and she directs it herself for her feature debut. Usually, when playwrights direct their own movie adaptations, the result is stiff and claustrophobic. You get a bunch of actors standing in a...

Gus Van Sant has always been at his best when he’s looking at people who are completely falling apart at the seams. Think about the drifters in My Own Private Idaho , the isolated teenagers in Paranoid Park , or the kids wandering the hallways in Elephant . He doesn’t really do glossy, manufactured Hollywood drama. He likes the weird, messy, uncomfortable corners of real life where there are no clean resolutions. With Dead Man’s Wire , he’s found a real-life historical subject that fits his entire cinematic worldview like a glove. It is a story that is almost too bizarre and intense to be true, but it actually happened back in the dead of winter in 1977 in Indianapolis. The film covers the stranger-than-fiction story of Tony Kiritsis, an ordinary, middle-aged guy who got so utterly pushed to the edge by his mortgage company that he snapped. In a state of pure, manic desperation, he wired a live, sawed-off shotgun directly to a banker’s neck with a complex system of wire and a dead man...

Long before Neil Armstrong uttered his historic words on the dusty plains of the Sea of Tranquility, and nearly two decades before Stanley Kubrick redefined the cosmos with his masterpiece, a small independent film did something truly revolutionary. It treated space travel not as a setting for ray-gun gothic fantasies or alien monster invasions, but as a hard, sober engineering challenge. Released in 1950, Destination Moon, which was directed by Irving Pichel and produced by the legendary George Pal, was the first major American film to trade in the pulp of the era for the cold, precise calculations of real-world physics. While modern audiences might look back at its slow pacing, wooden dialogue, and bold Technicolor palette with a sense of quaint nostalgia, viewing the film today requires a different lens. It is a cinematic time capsule, a blueprint of human ambition drafted at the dawn of the Cold War, functioning as both an impressive technical milestone and a fascinating ideologica...