The Rolling Tape

It's only June but Awards season here at The Awards Tape just got a whole lot more complicated. This week we analyze the aftermath of the Cannes Film Festival lineup to break down the early Oscar frontrunners and discuss which titles generated the buzz to possibly translate to Academy recognition. 

Then we turn to the bad news: a handful of titles we drafted earlier this season have officially been pushed to 2027, and we're working through what those delays mean for our rosters. 

Finally, we revise our previous draft teams at the negotiating table by...

We are finally talking about the cult classic show, AMC's Interview With The Vampire. The AMC series first premiered in 2022 and is based on the beloved novels by Ann Rice. Over two seasons, it becomes one of the most acclaimed genre shows on television. 

Thanks to standout performances from Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Asad Zaman, and an incredible supporting cast with the Vampire Lestat right around the corner. Today we are taking a step back to look at the first two seasons as a whole. What makes this adaptation work? Why has the fandom b...

If you're not careful and noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in this podcast, but fret not we don’t have moist carpet, mono-yellow walls or endless fluorescent lights. What we do have is a review of Kane Parsons’ breakout horror hit with A24, Backrooms, and a watchalong of the original video that inspired the film in 2022. 

Backrooms is directed by Kane Parsons in his feature-length directorial debut and written by Will Soodik. It is based on Parsons's web series and inspired by the "Backrooms" creepypasta that evolved onlin...

Founded in 2013 by Sarah Mueller, cinéSPEAK has built a reputation in Philadelphia through public screenings, artist support, and accessible film events across the city. That mission returns to Clark Park this summer with the organization’s annual festival, Under The Stars. 

Running every Friday from May 29 through June 19 in West Philly, the free festival combines live music and outdoor screenings of acclaimed nonfiction films fresh off the festival circuit. 

Jake Fittipaldi is joined by Sarah to discuss cinéSPEAK's mission, upcoming festival, and more on the horizon for the film, arts, and culture organization.

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It is time for our May READ RECEIPTS, a big screen book club from The Rolling Tape led by Kasey Dunifer! Every month, we read a book that’s been adapted for the screen, then we share our receipts. 

So if you like movies, or books, or movies AND books, you’re in the right place — and welcome to the club! 

Today we are talking about something a bit different. Instead of a film adaptation, it is a TV adaptation. We’re discussing MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES, the 2024...

The 79th Cannes Film Festival has come to an end, the Competition awards have been handed out, people have stood and clapped to their heart's content, and some of the most exciting films have debuted on the international scene.

It was a first for The Rolling Tape to be live on the ground at the Palais as our Co-Editor-in-Chief Danny Jarabek and our amazing contributor Nandita Joshi trekked to the festival and consumed cinema like no one else. A lot of sleepless nights, a lot of early morning battle royales for...

The regional spring festivals around the country in late April and early May are a great check-in on a bucket of titles ranging from second screenings of Sundance and SXSW premieres from earlier in the year to undistributed titles from the previous year’s fall festival cycle. The Rolling Tape was in attendance and today we’re road tripping from Philadelphia to Chicago to Seattle to discuss our experiences across three festivals. 

Des attended the Seattle International Film Festival for the first time, Adam Patla attended the Chicago Critics Film Festival for the second time and first joine...

Low-class urban bitches it’s time to boost because after its premiere at SXSW on March 12, 2026, NEON has theatrically released Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters on May 22. We’ll review the San Francisco-adjacent anticapitalist satire before shifting gears through some post-production magic over to a LIVE COMMENTARY of the Cannes closing award ceremony that saw Fjord take home the Palme d'Or. 

I Love Boosters follows a group of shoplifters taking aim at a cutthroat fashion maven by stealing her clothes and reselling them at a lower price. The film st...

For her first feature film, Le Triangle d’or, presented in the Special Screenings section at Cannes 2026, Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz joins Nandita Joshi live from the festival to discuss her work on the film. Going back to her last short, Mambo Queens, Rosselet-Ruiz's often interrogates the intersection of femininity and class struggle, which present themselves as major themes of her first feature.

To make ends meet, Laura takes a job working for Souria in a grand mansion in Paris’s Golden Triangle. Installed there by her lover, a wealthy Saudi prince, Souria lives i...

As the Cannes Film Festival rages on toward the end with premieres and social reactions flooding our feeds, The Awards Tape is shifting gears for a week to a new area of focus for the show, the Emmys. At the time of this recording, there are two weeks left in the window eligibility for the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards for 2026. The nominations will be announced on July 8th, with the ceremony taking place on September 14th. 

It's a new chapter for the Awards Tape as Oscar season is in deep slumber before the F...

After her first two features, Relic and Apartment 7A, Natalie Erika James has cemented herself as a regular name to watch within the horror space. James is an Australian filmmaker, and Saccharine is not only her third feature film but also her second to have its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. James often centers her filmmaking in horror around the dread and atmosphere of environments rather than jump scares, making for some incredibly chilling sequences, but Saccharine combines both her strengths in the horror space alongside new elements of body...

Mariana Fabian joins director Jeremy Seifert for the Mountainfilm Festival premiere of Paper Town, a film that follows a paper mill that defined Canton, North Carolina, announcing its sudden closure. Filmed in real time, its is a raw look at a town blindsided by corporate silence and suspicious profit. As shock turns to anger, the people of Canton must navigate the wreckage of an industry that shaped their past and now threatens their future. 

Seifert is an award-winning film director, cinematographer and editor whose documentaries have premiered at Sundance, Berlinale, Hot Docs, Tribeca and AFI D...

In a galaxy far, far away...we started our Star Wars journey long ago. Since then, we have encountered the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, theatrical spin-offs, and now, at last, the final episode to cap off our rankings. We rank the 2 most recent Star Wars theatrical releases: Solo: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. These are two of the more controversial Star Wars entries, which create a fun conversation to close out our Season 6 rankings. 

We’ve made it to another season finale of RETRO//RANKED, The Rol...

Ceniza en la Boca had its World Premiere at Cannes 2026 in the Special Screenings section of the festival. The film is directed by Diego Luna and described as follows: Lucila leaves Mexico with her younger brother to reunite with their mother in Madrid, who had left a few years earlier to chase a better future. When they finally arrive, the bitter, suffocating reality that awaits them proves far harsher than Lucila had imagined. Still, she is determined to make the most of this fragile new life.

We are joined by actresses Adriana Paz & Anna Díaz to d...

It’s been a horror sensation since it premiered at during Midnight Madness at TIFF in 2025, but Obsession directed by Curry Barker has finally made its way to wide release after Focus Features purchased the film for $15 million. We’ll review the YouTuber-turned-feature filmmaker’s breakout hit and blind rank horror’s history of cursed objects, including the One Wish Willow. Stay with us.

Obsession's story is as follows: after breaking the mysterious "One Wish Willow" to win his crush's heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon...

The hit HBO series Euphoria is currently in full swing for its third season from creator Sam Levinson, and today we take a look behind the scenes with the full editing team who helped bring the show to life in post-production. The group shares their insights into crafting the tonal shifts of Season 3 and how they have evolved the show over time in reaction to the growing cast who offer a diverse array of performances and character types. 

Follow our interviewees online:
Nikola Boyanov IMDb
Aaron I. Butler IMDb
Aleshka Ferrero IMDb

We are continuing with Season 6 of RETRO//RANKED by jumping into two unique entries into the Star Wars universe, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. Rogue One takes place immediately before the events of Episode IV: A New Hope. It is the ninth theatrically released entry in the Star Wars franchise. It hit theaters on December 16, 2016, and was directed by Gareth Edwards. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi is the tenth Star...

We are LIVE at the 79th Cannes International Film Festival with our first in-person recording. Danny Jarabek and Nandita Joshi are on the ground in the south of France adorned in couture and black tie for the world's biggest international stage of cinema.

The lineup is set, the red carpet is rolled out, and the Palais is ready to go for the 79th annual Cannes Film Festival. We previously discussed the competition lineup in depth upon the lineup announcement, but now we look at specifically what we have tickets for as of opening night.

Today on The Rolling Remote, we are talking about the currently airing third season of Euphoria, HBO's phenomenon of a TV series created by Sam Levinson. Over the past few weeks, we've been revisiting seasons one and two of the show (you can listen to our recap episodes), and now we finally get to talk about a new season as it's unfolding in real time after years of delays and rumors, production discourse, and a lot of questions about what the series would even look like in a third season. 

Season three picks u...

Critics are calling it quote “the most pleasant surprise of the year” but what are we bleating about today? I won’t pull the wool over your eyes, today we’re discussing Kyle Balda’s The Sheep Detectives. We’ll take a look at the studio behind the film, Amazon MGM, and wrap up with this week’s mini-game guessing mystery movies based on Letterboxd reviews. Stay with us.

Get your mutton ready we’re discussing The Sheep Detectives. The film is directed by Kyle Balda and written by Craig Mazin, based on the 2005 novel T...

It’s feeling humid. It’s feeling like summer is very nearly upon us. That of course, means it’s time for us to reconvene for our second annual summer box office draft. With the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2 this past weekend, the summer movie season is now in full swing. We are here today to try to predict where the box office will go and just have a fun time breaking down the slate and discussing which movies have each of us the most excited.

We discuss the chronological releases of movies on our...

Happy May the 4th week! Today, in continuing with Season 6 of RETRO//RANKED, we’re launching into the final era of our Star Wars season. We’ve journeyed through the originals and the prequels, and now we’ve reached our final destination to start the sequels with The Force Awakens, joined by the 2008 theatrically released animated film The Clone Wars as we head closer and closer toward the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu.

Our current collaborative ranking so far:

In honor of The Devil Wears Prada 2, we’re hosting a special edition Awards Draft centered entirely on the incomparable Meryl Streep. Streep’s legacy is completely singular with a generations spanning career that emphasized her versatility as an actress going back to 1975.

For many of us, Streep is the gold standard for prestige performances, particularly in the kind of mid-budget adult dramas Hollywood rarely produces today. With a filmography approaching 65 roles, her impact is as expansive as it is enduring.

For this draft, we’re narrowing the field to her 21 Academy Award–nominate...

The millennial nostalgia is real today as we break out the florals for spring in David Frankel’s return to the world of Runway magazine and high editorial fashion in The Devil Wears Prada 2. We review the film as well as discuss the career of the film’s iconic lead, Anne Hathaway who is in the midst of a career year. 

Gird your loins for the sequel to 2006’s modern classic The Devil Wears Prada with its direct sequel 20 years later. The film is directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna...

Aaron Bartuska is a Drexel graduate, filmmaker, and current high school film teacher. His latest feature, These Are My Friends!, recently played at Philadelphia Film Society's SpringFest, which is especially meaningful for Aaron and the film, as it was shot and produced locally in Philly. The film is a single-night comedy that follows various mid-twenties drifters over the course of one party.

Co-Writer and Director Aaron Bartuska joins us to discuss the production process, which mostly took place four years ago across multiple weekends during the COVID pandemic. He is also in the midst of...

Apologies everyone, there’s been a slight shift in programming. Hayden Christensen backed out of his guest spot for this episode. He told us he was down to make a guest appearance, but sent a text backing out at the last second saying, "I don’t like podcasts. They’re long and rough and irritating, and they get everywhere." Oh well, maybe next time.

Welcome to another episode of RETRO//RANKED, the Rolling Tape podcast series in which we discuss various franchises and filmographies that we love and rank their individual entries leading up to some o...

RETRO//RECAP is a spin-off series from RETRO//RANKED where we hit pause on the rankings and rewind the tape to catch you up on everything that’s happened in a franchise or filmography before the next entry hits theaters. Last time, we dove into the Scream franchise, but today we’re trading in the knives for Dolce & Gabbana in the 2006 workplace comedy classic The Devil Wears Prada ahead of the sequel set to release in theaters on May 1. 

Released two decades ago, The Devil Wears Prada is directed by Da...

It's another year and you know what that means, another music biopic. This weekend saw the release of Michael, the latest of the popular trend of famous musician biographies hitting the big screen, this time focused on the early life and 80s peak of pop star Michael Jackson. The first thought for many Oscar pundits' brains was, is Michael an awards contender? Does it matter if critics dislike the film if it's so popular with the general public? And what is the history for music biopics at the Academy Awards? 

We answer all t...

We are finally stepping outside of our usual HBO bubble at The Rolling Remote because today we're heading to Netflix to talk about Beef Season 2. If you're not familiar with Beef, it's a Netflix anthology series created by Lee Sung Jin. At its core, it's about conflict, something usually small, impulsive, almost meaningless, that spirals into something way bigger than it should. It's super messy, uncomfortable, funny, and usually ends up revealing a lot about the people who are involved. 

Season 1 starred Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as Danny Cho and Amy Lau, t...

Consider it a music festival weekend here on The Rolling Tape podcast because we’re discussing both real and fake pop stars alike with Michael, Lionsgate’s long-awaited Michael Jackson biopic directed by Antoine Fuqua and Mother Mary, A24’s deconstruction of its titular fictional music icon directed by David Lowery.

Michael follows the life of the American singer Michael Jackson, covering his involvement in the Jackson 5 in the 1960s to the 1980s Bad tour. Jackson is portrayed by his nephew Jaafar Jackson and as a child by Juliano Krue Valdi, both i...

We are off to the pod races!!! For Season 6, Episode 2 of RETRO//RANKED, we are jumping into hyperspace across the outer rim of the galaxy, and weesa dive into the Sarlac Pitt today...

Welcome to another episode of RETRO//RANKED, the Rolling Tape podcast series in which we discuss various franchises and filmographies that we love and rank their individual entries leading up to some of the biggest new releases. Today, we continue with Star Wars, finishing off the original trilogy and turning the page to a much more divisive chapter with the prequel trilogy as we...

The Cannes Film Festival lineup is officially here as we announced last week, so while it’s a quieter stretch for awards news, we’re leaning into the chaos in the best way possible with ACTING PREDICTIONS.

After our recent Vulture-style 2027 Oscar Contenders draft, our Awards Editor, Paul Rai, takes things a step further by predicting all four acting categories for the 2027 Oscars completely blind. With limited information on categories and plenty of guesswork (and likely wrong predictions), it’s an early, off-the-cuff snapshot of where the acting awards races could go.

Plus, with C...

The Rolling Tape attended CinemaCon this year! Our very own Kam Ryan was at the expo in Las Vegas participating in events, activations, and panels in the annual trade show for theater owners.

CinemaCon took place in Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas this past week. More than just an episode of The Studio, it’s one of the core events of the film industry’s annual news cycle and the world’s largest gathering for the motion picture theater industry featuring major studios sharing their slate with theater owners for the rest of the year and beyond. We’ll di...

We are wrapping up Season 2 of The Pitt!! Spoilers ahead for Episodes 11-15 (including the season finale...).

Noah Wyle's hit HBO medical drama has quietly become everybody’s favorite show, and every time we come back to it, it’s somehow more chaotic, more stressful, and honestly just more fun to talk about.

We covered the first half of the season earlier, so today we’re diving into Episodes 11 through 15 and then zooming out to talk about Season 2 as a whole discussing what worked, what didn’t, and where this show is heading next.

In a reimagining of The Mummy franchise that dates back to the Universal Classic Monster series of the 1930’s. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is written and directed by, you guessed it, Lee Cronin, known most recently for Evil Dead Rise in 2023. 

In addition to reviewing the film, we contextualize the greater Mummy franchise with where it has been and where it’s going, as well as discuss Blumhouse, the studio behind this latest installment. 

The film synopsis is as follows: the young daughter of a journalist disappears into the dese...

Pete Ohs works as a director, producer, writer, editor, and cinematographer. He has produced and directed five feature films in the past five years. In 2025, he was at Sundance with OBEX, a fantasy adventure feature he produced, co-wrote and shot. This was followed by The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick, a genre-bending horror satire he directed, co-wrote and shot.

Here, Pete joins us to discuss Erupcja, a "foreign film" experiment that was produced with a light outline and shot chronologically in Warsaw, Poland. A volcanic eruption strands Bethany...

A long time ago on a podcast far far away…

Welcome to a brand new season of RETRO//RANKED, The Rolling Tape seasonal series in which we discuss various franchises and filmographies that we love and rank their individual entries leading up to some of the biggest new releases. Today, we lift off with Season 6 to the Star Wars galaxy. Over the course of the next several episodes, we’ll be covering every single theatrically released Star Wars film ever made, including one or two that may surprise you. We are, of course, doin...

The Cannes Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, is just a month away, running May 12–24. This past Thursday, Artistic Director Thierry Frémaux and President Iris Knobloch announced the official selections, including In Competition, Out of Competition, Un Certain Regard, and more. For those following awards season, Cannes has increasingly become an unofficial kickoff. As the Academy’s international membership has expanded in recent years, so has the awards impact of Cannes premieres.

On this episode, we’ll break down the Competi...

WAHOO!!! We’re off to the outer galaxy, not alongside the Artemis II astronauts but rather with two Italian plumbers in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, it is the sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie from 2023, which we previously reviewed on the podcast in Episode 034.

Mario, Luigi, and their friends adventure into outer space, where they meet Princess Rosalina and face off against Bowser and his son, Bowser Jr. Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, and Keegan-Michael Ke...

With the release of A24's The Drama, we thought it would be a great time to take a moment to talk about A24 as a studio. When it comes to independent films and Oscar-winning successes, no indie film studio has exploded in popularity and name recognition to the same degree as A24, winning Best Picture twice (Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once) in its 14-year existence.

For some, A24 is a brand, it's an aesthetic, it's a way of life. And for others, it's an arbiter of quality, an...