The Rough Cut Cinema Podcast

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 one of a two-part conversation about the obsession with intellectual property in cinema, Zach and Carson 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.

While many of the rest of the year's most anticipated movies have played at various festivals already, many more have yet to be screened publicly. Will they be masterpieces? Or disasters? Zach and Carson make their predictions as they preview everything from Maestro to Saw X the best way they know how: a competitive draft.

Zach and Carson discuss Australian horror debut Talk to Me, before working together to construct a modern horror syllabus spanning the last 10 years.

The day we'd all been waiting for has come and gone: the Barbie and Oppenheimer combo was a wild critical and commercial success, and Zach and Carson are here to break down the phenomenon and discuss their thoughts on two of the year's most exciting films.

With one of the great franchises back in theaters, Zach and Carson discuss the latest Mission: Impossible installment and then build out their proposed 10-film syllabus for a theoretical Tom Cruise 101 course.

(00:00) Introduction

(03:40) Mission: Impossible

(33:37) The Tom Cruise Syllabus

Rough Cut Cinema is back! Join Zach and Carson as they discuss moviegoing from the first half of 2023, digging into topics such as: the Oscar chances of Past Lives and Asteroid City, the state of Movie Stardom, the acting styles of Keanu Reeves and Dave Bautista, and Barbie and Oppenheimer pre-release fatigue.

With Nia DaCosta's Candyman reboot hitting theatres, we've made an exception to our minimum credits rule to talk about that film's producer and cowriter, the Oscar-winning Jordan Peele. Join Carson and Zach as they talk about 2019's Us, discuss Peele's contributions to the genre, try to unpack the Academy's response to horror, and play — for one of your hosts — a very rough round of the Letterboxd game. 

Sara joins Carson and Zach as they draft their most anticipated movies set to drop for the rest of 2021, with one twist: you're only allowed to watch one new release per month.