The Rolling Tape

*TIFF Recap recorded BEFORE the People's Choice Announcement*

See all of The Rolling Tape's TIFF 2026 coverage here.

By the time you're listening to this, the 51st Toronto International Film Festival will have wrapped up its 11-day run, which featured world premieres of Siân Heder's Being Heumann, Chris Rock's Misty Green, Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky, and many more films coming off festivals like Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. Famously dubbed the "People's Festival," Toronto gives movie fans and critics the opportunity to see some of the most acclaimed f...

Bachata music dominates the world today. With artists like Luis Vargas, Anthony Santos, Juan Luis Guerra, and Romeo Santos, the upbeat tunes with the somber lyrics are a staple of Hispanic and Latino clubs, parties, weddings, and so on. The music has a long history – it’s one that contemporary audiences might not know, and it’s part of what Agridulce, Frank Pavich’s new documentary, is trying to showcase. 

Producer of the film, Benjamin de Menil joins The Rolling Tape to talk about his experience founding The Academia de Bachata, his reasoning for making Agridulce, the importanc...

After seven live action films in the video game adaptation franchise, Resident Evil is back in business with Zach Cregger at the helm coming off the meteoric Oscar sensation for Amy Madigan in Weapons in his third feature. 

Resident Evil is directed by Zach Cregger and written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, based on the Resident Evil video game franchise. It follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who must fight through an outbreak of infected monsters in Raccoon City. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser feature in supporting ro...

Judy Heumann lived a storied life, challenging the status quo, exposing governmental flaws, and giving a voice to one of the most marginalized, castaway communities: people with disabilities. She passed away suddenly in 2023 at age 75, after years of involvement in the movie adaptation of her biography, “Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist.” Siân Heder, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker known for CODA (2021), helms the adaptation, titled Being Heumann.  

Halfway through reading Heumann’s memoir, Heder immediately reached out to discuss adapting it for the screen. The two met, and the rest was history. Eleven y...

Nick Kozakis is already on his third feature film, but this year marks his first TIFF appearance and his first Midnight Madness world premiere. Kick On follows a group of partiers looking to score to keep their night going, only to cross the wrong mob boss and end up in a bloody fight for survival. 

Nadia Arain sat down with Kozakis at the festival to talk to him about his approach to storytelling and his influences as a filmmaker.

Read more of her interview here.

Follow our interviewee online:
Nick K...

Making its World Premiere at TIFF 2026 and directed by Serville Poblete, Sunburn is a hang-out movie set in St. James Town, a high-rise community in Toronto, and follows a group of young people trying to stay cool during the summer’s hottest day. The temperature triggers a power outage, which sends them out of their buildings and into the street.

Serville Poblete is a Filipino-Canadian screenwriter and film director from Toronto. His short documentary King’s Court, premiered at Hot Docs 2025 and was nominated for a 2026 Canadian Screen Award. His latest shor...

After the ceremony on Monday night hosted by Mariska Hargitay and her double-digit outfit changes, we recap the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards. We discuss everything from the broadcast itself to our thoughts on the host, all of the various comedy bits, the televised vs. non-televised categories, to the biggest wins and surprises for shows including Widows Bay, The Pitt, and more.

We also have an important conversation about where the Emmys are headed in the future and how we're feeling overall about the state of the Emmys in 2026 after recent reports...

See The Rolling Tape's Venice coverage here.

We're in the thick of fall festival season. The Venice International Film Festival wrapped up last week with its Main Competition awards as the jury gave Woman Unknown the prestigious Golden Lion, while the Telluride Film Festival went out with an explosive bang last Sunday after its surprise screening of You Can See Everything, the new documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. We're currently halfway into the Toronto International Film Festival.

Today, we recap Venice...

Fall festivals are in full swing with Venice just recently announcing the Golden Lion, Telluride buzzing with Nathan Fielder shenanigans and secret screenings, and TIFF just beginning to play its wide slate of premieres, but while much of our team is abroad watching those movies we are here putting in the work on theatrical releases doubling down with Practical Magic 2 and Hope, your classic double feature.

Practical Magic 2 is directed by Susanne Bier and the sequel to Practical Magic. The film stars Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, and...

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We are back with a LIVE COMMENTARY WATCHALONG of a movie that you've been voting for on our Instagram stories over the past couple of weeks. After making it through our bracket of 16 contenders, we have a winner, and we're here to cash in that check. We're here to watch the movie. We're here to talk alongside the film. 

That film being Godzilla Minus One, the 2023 Japanese mega hit that is now delivering a sequel, Godzilla Minus Zero, t...

Zombies are an iconic feature of horror that have existed for almost a century, the earliest representation appearing in White Zombie (1932). However, how much do we really know about the roots of the zombie, where did they come from, and what does it tell us about our culture and our understanding of this trope?

In Black Zombie, writer and director Maya Annik Bedward explores these questions about the zombie, specifically its origin and reality, in relation to Haitian vodou culture. In an interview with The Rolling Tape, she discusses her experience...

With Telluride wrapping up and Venice getting ready to deliver the Golden Lion, we are now previewing the Toronto International Film Festival. We have five team members who will be in attendance at the 51st edition of TIFF and today we discuss an in-depth look at the TIFF lineup and detail our schedules and priorities for what we want to see and do while in Toronto starting September 10. The lineup features 293 official selection titles, with Opening Night programmed with Siân Heder's Being Heumann.

Listen on Patreon for an extended pre-episode conversation where the team b...

Just mere hours after A24 premiered their major festival venture in Primetime at the Venice International Film Festival, and a surprise screening of You Can See Everything at Telluride, we review their current theatrical release Onslaught. It’s not our first Adam Wingard joint, following up our April 2024 review of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Wingard has escaped the Monsterverse (for now) to return to his action slasher roots.

Onslaught is directed by Adam Wingard and written by Wingard and Simon Barrett. When a rogue sq...

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 differences between the two, what worked, what didn’t, and how we feel about this as an...

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 this year's Primetime Emmys.

The last time we talked about the Emmys, we were reacting to the nominations, where shows like Widow's Bay, <...

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. Smith, based on the 2012 novel by Peter Heller. The film stars Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce, and follo...

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 Chinese immigrant form an unlikely partnership to steal milk from a prized cow while The Mastermind introduces us to a failed architect who, despite having 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 potential precursors and Oscar nominations they'll earn later in the season.

We each started with eight films during our initial draft on April 1. We followed that up with an episode...

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, including Maddie’s Secret, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Tony, and It Ends.

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 release which brings us here. Ullom has dubbed It Ends as “hangout horror,” blending suffocating horror with the heart of a summer coming-of-age story. He joins Adam Patla to discuss the making of th...

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 love. With the film celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, we're taking a look back at the movie that captured Hollywood's imagination.

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