The Rolling Tape

There were dogs. There were stars. There were dog stars. We read them. We watched them. And it’s time for our receipts. So welcome back to Read Receipts: A Big Screen Book Club from The Rolling Tape where each month we read a book and watch its onscreen adaptation. This month we read The Dog Stars by Peter Heller and watched the new film The Dog Stars from Ridley Scott. We’ll get into the differen...

The 78th Emmy Awards are just a couple of weeks away, with the main ceremony airing Monday, September 14, and the Creative Arts Emmys taking place September 5 and 6. Half of The Rolling Tape team will be traveling around the globe between Venice and the Toronto International Film Festival, so we wanted to get one episode out the door before we depart discussing our predictions for what will win at...

Double feature day, The Rolling Tape’s 4-year anniversary, celebrating Dolly Parton, Peter Cullen, and Tim Curry (science fiction double feature anyone?). A lot on the table for this week’s episode as we look back on 4 years and 637 episodes of the podcast. We review two films in theaters, The Dog Stars and Coyote vs. Acme .  The Dog Stars is directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Mark L. S...

In our second Women in Film Spotlight for Ladies Night, we delve into the career of Kelly Reichardt spotlighting two of her films: First Cow and The Mastermind . Both films reflect her unique storytelling style of slow cinema that challenges conventional narratives while exploring profound themes related to the human experience. First Cow transports us to the early 19th century, where a cook and a...

See our live Fantasy results here on our website . We're taking a bit of a pause from our ongoing Oscar predictions to revisit the Oscar Contenders Fantasy Draft we started back in April. A group of us drafted films we believed would be major awards contenders, and we accumulate points based on each film's performance at the box office, critics' and audience reception, and the poten...

Instead of stepping inside the Insidious franchise this weekend with Insidious: Out of the Further , we’re switching it up here today because summer is winding down, and also we make the rules here. Rather than our typical review of one movie, we are reviewing four that have stood out to our team over the past couple of months that we have not talked about in-depth on prior review episodes, includ...

It’s been six years since the idea for It Ends entered writer-director Alex Ullom ’s brain. The “hangout horror” film played the festival circuit, where it generated considerable buzz (you can read our team’s review from last year’s Chicago Critics Fest here ). It then went on to be one of the first films available on the Letterboxd Video Store . Neon subsequently scooped the film for theatrical r...

Is it another day of sun? Or is there someone in the crowd on this lovely night, as a city of stars shines bright for those who dare to dream? If that gives you any indication, we're talking about the Oscar-winning musical La La Land , starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. It's a bittersweet romantic tale about two creative artists in Los Angeles who pursue their dreams while falling in...

Today, we're heading back to Westeros. After more than two years away, House of the Dragon is finally back for its long-awaited third season. And it's time for the Dance of the Dragons, the war we've been waiting for and the conflict fans have been asking to see fully erupt. The season opens with the absolutely insane Battle of the Gullet and only gets more chaotic from there. We ge...

Before we officially get into the buzz of the fall festival circuit, it’s good to take a step back in time and reflect on bygone eras of planetary history. Today in fact, we’re embracing that by going 200 million years in reverse to the age of dinosaurs with David Robert Mitchell and The End of Oak Street .  The End of Oak Street is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell as his third featur...

Welcome back to In The Queue , a new show in The Rolling Tape network of podcasts that answers the question “What should I watch this weekend?” Every month, we line up what’s in theaters, what’s headlining our watchlists, and what we recommend adding to yours.  We kicked off this series all the way back in March and then went on summer vacation for 6 months, who's to blame us? But at long las...

In just a few weeks, Venice, Telluride, New York, and Toronto will kick off a new cycle of anticipated awards contenders, with premieres and early reactions that will reshape our already exhaustive Oscar predictions. This is where some of our assumptions about certain films will go to die, or be validated. Who's to say? Even though films like Digger , The Social Reckoning , and Dune: Part Thr...

You know what's more romantic than living under an authoritarian government where you can only have sex for one night of the year? Finding your true love for life. Time to nut up for Will Gluck's One Night Only , starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner.  Written by Travis Braun and based on his Black List script. The film follows two hapless romantics, Monica Barbaro's Allie, a ho...

While it didn’t debut at Fantasia Fest (that honor belongs to SXSW this year), A Safe Distance also played at the Montreal-based festival. An eighty-five-minute thriller, A Safe Distance follows Alex ( Bethany Brown ) as she goes camping with her long-time partner in the forest of Canada. Shortly into their stay,  Joey ( Chris McNally ) pops the question to Alex. She says no. And, well, things don...

It's the opening weekend of Spider-Man: Brand New Day , but I don't think we can conclusively say it'll be part of this upcoming awards conversation—outside of a potential Best Visual Effects nomination. So instead of focusing on that amid the hundreds of millions of dollars being made by The Odyssey and Spider-Man , there's a much smaller film quietly holding its own at the bo...

It’s episode 200 of our weekly Monday show, and what better way to celebrate than with the 38th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and the fourth film in the MCU Spider-Man film series. It's also National Spider-Man Day which is celebrated annually on August 1st. The date marks the anniversary of the character's first comic book appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15 , published in A...

We celebrate the 20th anniversary of She’s The Man by breaking down the film and “women in sports” movies. We also give some of our favorite recs from the genre and look at the progression of sports films over the past two decades.  She’s The Man , loosely based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, stars Amanda Bynes as Viola Hastings, a high school soccer player who disguises herself as her twin...

In a barren post-apocalyptic world with no humans, a barter system of sunflowers for scrap parts, and robots, Zap is very lonely. In his scavenging one day, he finds the broken body of another robot. His curiosity gets the better of him, and he takes this robot home, in hopes of reviving it. As we follow Zap on his journey, the theme of Sunspark remains ever clear: how far are you willing to go to...

The lineup for the 83rd Venice International Film Festival was announced on Thursday, July 23, coming on the heels of the first wave of announcements from the Toronto International Film Festival. That means we're officially entering fall festival season, the multi-week stretch in late August and September where many of the biggest contenders for the 99th Academy Awards will make their world p...

We're going channel surfing for round 2!  If you missed our last Channel Surfing episode, instead of spending an hour diving deep into a single series, we bounce around the television landscape and talk about the shows we haven't had a chance to cover on the main show, along with the hidden gems we think deserve a little more attention. Hopefully, we'll give all of you (and ourselve...

Christopher Nolan please exit stage left, this episode is for the freaks.  It's time to get wild, Olivia Wilde that is! With her third directorial feature, The Invite , in theaters as of last week, and an upcoming leading role in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex set to go into wide release next week, we discuss her career building up to this moment. In her directorial effort, The Invite , Joe an...

Heartstopper Forever is a new Netflix film that concludes the three-season TV series Heartstopper , which was adapted from Alice Oseman's graphic novels. Set in the UK, the story follows a gay high school romance and the friendships that surround it. We're joined by Todd Downing , editor of the film, to discuss bringing the beloved coming-of-age romance to its emotional conclusion.  Todd...

We read it. We watched it. It’s time for the receipts. For this month’s Read Receipts , we are going on an Odyssey. Or should we say a Pod-yssey? Welcome back to your favorite podcast for readers and watchers alike. If you’re new here, this is Read Receipts: A Big Screen Book Club from The Rolling Tape . Every month, we read a book, watch its onscreen adaptation, then share our receipts. I am your...

Ten years on this fucking podcast. Let's go home! Today, our destiny comes to a close. We add The Odyssey to our collaborative rankings that we've been building for weeks. Call it the Trojan horse of RETRO//RANKED , but where will it end up? RETRO//RANKED is a Rolling Tape network series ranking the individual entries of beloved franchises and filmographies, timed to major new releases....

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is quite possibly the most anticipated film of the year. It marks Nolan's first feature since Oppenheimer , which won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, along with Actor, Supporting Actor, Film Editing, Cinematography, and Original Score. The film grossed more than $970 million worldwide, and in the wake of that success, Nolan...