Hello, and welcome back to Rough Cut Cinema! Our team has been on a brief hiatus, but with the unofficial start of the summer movie season kicking off this past weekend, now felt like an opportune time for a quick review of the year in cinema to date. Not every film will be covered, but here are a few stray thoughts from the first four months of 2024 moviegoing.

​Back in 2019, two events coincided: the premiere of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and the founding of Rough Cut Cinema. One of the first articles we published was a tiered retrospective of Scorsese’s films, a format that we’ve returned to since to discuss auteurs such as Jane Campion and Ang Lee — instead of a traditional “ranking” (an inherently silly project no matter how you slice it), we place a director’s films into thematic groupings, then tier those groups based…

We’re at an interesting inflection point in the fall movie season, where many of the big-ticket items have premiered, but there’s still plenty of festival offerings ahead. With that in mind, a few more thoughts on the Toronto International Film Festival’s 2023 slate:

If you were to identify the most fascinating filmmaking careers of the two-decade-old century, British writer-director Jonathan Glazer would find himself high on the list. Despite working sporadically, Glazer’s four features chart an evolving sensibility and style that can beguile and repel in equal measure. His live-wire debut Sexy Beast set a tone that he quickly swerved away from, maintaining the dreamy symbolism but dropping the freneticism in favor of a statelier pace for follow-up Birth, a film which —…

Is this the end of the road for Hayao Miyazaki? The legendary Japanese animator — one of the most captivatingly original directors we’ve ever seen — has long been rumored to retire, first after the release of 2013’s The Wind Rises and most recently in the lead-up to his latest work, The Boy and the Heron (originally titled How Do You Live?). Though recent comments indicate that perhaps Miyazaki still has more work ahead, his latest film is nothing short…

Going into the 2023 edition of the Toronto International Film festival, I wondered whether the energy might be off: the ongoing strikes by the actors’ and writers’ guilds — holding strong in their fight for equity — had created a potential pall over the fall festival circuit as most major stars, even those whose films had brokered agreements with the guilds, eschewed public promotional appearances in the name of solidarity. But while the red carpets were noticeably less star-studded, to…

On a jam-packed episode, your hosts review the current state of their Fall 2023 Movie Draft slates and report back from the Toronto International Film Festival, before discussing buzzy comedy Bottoms and building out a High School Comedy Syllabus with 10 films from 1980 through the present.

In part two of a conversation about intellectual property, The Rough Cut Cinema Podcast discusses the initial successes and recent failures of Marvel and DC films, and what it would take to turn the ship around.

In part one of a two-part conversation about the obsession with intellectual property in cinema, the hosts of The Rough Cut Cinema Podcast discuss The Last Voyage of the Demeter and use Universal Pictures as a case study for the question of how to use IP to give audiences what they actually want.