Insidious, Finding Emily & Fixing the Movies

This week on After the Frame, we’ve got two very different reviews before zooming out for a bigger conversation about the state of movies themselves. We start with Insidious: Out of the Further, a return to a horror franchise that may finally be running out of places to go.

There are still a few effective scares and a genuinely uncomfortable dental-horror hook, but familiar mythology, recycled genre beats, and characters we struggle to care about leave us wondering whether some horror franchises simply need to know when to stop. Then we switch gears with Finding Emily, a perfectly competent modern rom-com that raises a completely different problem: what happens when a movie does almost everything fine, but nothing memorably?

We talk about the performances, the straightforward execution, and why being merely “solid” can sometimes be more frustrating than taking a big swing and missing. That leads us into a wider conversation about how we’d improve the movie business, from the types of stories studios should be taking more chances on to the habits, trends, and creative decisions we’d love to see change.

Less about complaining that “movies are bad now,” and more about what could actually make going to the movies better. Two reviews, one bigger industry conversation, and plenty of thoughts on what Hollywood should keep, kill, and rethink.